Nina Simone!

Nina Simone
oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches, 2016

To Be Young, Gifted and Black is a song written by Nina Simone with Weldon Irvine in memory of the author, and friend of Simone, Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun). It was just released as a single in October of 1969 when Simone performed it live at the Philharmonic Hall in New York. The concert in front of a white audience (which Simone does not fail to mention in her introduction to To Be Young, Gifted and Black) was recorded and released on the album Black Gold of 1970. I found the album together with 'Nuff Said of 1968, at the local Goodwill Outlet Center—the last place items exist before being crunched in a giant garbage machine. The album existed on a shelf, or in a box, in someone's house for 46 years, hardly ever played, before being rescued from its destruction. And now it has a new life, and a painting dedicated to it. "Her picture is painted in my memory without a color of despair, and no matter where I go she is always there." (added lyrics to Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair.)

For those of you who ever visited the Koreshan State Park in Estero might recognize the background as being the generator building interior.

!Kung Bushmen of Namibia

!Kung Bushmen women singing
oil on acrylic on found canvas, 30 x 40 inches, 2016

The !Kung Bushmen are a San people (see previous post) living in Angola and Namibia. The exclamation point marks a clicking sound that is part of their language. Miriam Makeba popularized the sound in her 1960 hit song The Click Song. For anyone interested in the music of the San peoples with their ancient roots I highly recommend the Folkways album Music of the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert from 1962. As always, and this is the great thing about Folkways, their albums are always available. On their fabulous website you can listen to outtakes of every song before purchasing.

The San of Namibia

San women singing
oil on on acrylic on found canvas, 30 x 40 inches, 2016

 The depiction of a human being, the only one found at Lascaux, is widely interpreted as an image of a shaman. A nineteenth century photograph of a (Californian) shaman clearly shows a similarity with the figure depicted in the caves of Lascaux some 17.000 years earlier. Literature accepting the shamanic interpretation focuses on the depiction of the man in an ecstatic trance state as opposed to the earlier interpretation as a man in the throes of death. A shaman symbolically dies before entering the spirit realm. Georges Bataille uses the term little death (la petite mort) in discussing the state the human at Lascaux. David Lewis-Williams and Jean Clottes, against the archaeological taboo of making inferences by ethnographical analogy, first forwarded their theories linking cave paintings with shamanic ritual in 1996.31 Lewis-Williams had studied the San since the early nineteen-eighties. Research by Lewis-Williams into trance ceremonies performed by the San people in Namibia has shown that the shaman in a state of trance figuratively dies. He collapses and his soul leaves the body and travels to the spirit world. Before the San were studied in Namibia they had lived near Drakensberg in South Africa until the late nineteenth century, when they were displaced by the South African Government. The San had a long tradition of cave and rock painting while at Drakensberg but in their new home in the Kalahari Desert this tradition ended. There are no caves in the desert and the San stopped painting but still live according to their traditions. South African rock paintings by the San peoples bear striking similarities with cave paintings found in Southern Europe. German philologist Wilhelm Bleek, together with Lucy Lloyd, studied the San people at a time when they were still active at Drakensberg. They left behind an enormous archive of transcripts of interviews, giving a detailed account of San customs, beliefs, and language. The assumed analogy of the San people and the Paleolithic cave painters provide us with valuable information on the lives and works of the latter, but shamanic interpretations of cave art are still disputed. Through an analogy with shamanic cultures, that have been studied in Siberia and North America in the early twentieth century, and with the San people of South Africa, researchers sketched an outline of the first known artists that existed in southern France  and Northern Spain about 40,000 years ago. Lewis-Williams and Clottes speculate that the shamans of southern France and northern Spain were the first professional artists. Individuals who have been designated to perform the function of artists within a community can be distinguished by their psychological traits, often at an early age. The individuals were chosen to be artists through their character of otherness. They could be men or women. 

The above is a section from my forthcoming textbook You are an Artist! For the very reason the text is included in an art textbook, the San are one of the most interesting peoples to look at, and listen too, in the context of musicology. Deemed unscientific to form any conclusion on prehistoric arts by inference of the ethnography of recent cultures, listening to San ceremonies one can nonetheless sense what music like was during Paleolithic times. Personally I don't see a reason why the traditions of the San aren't many thousands of years old. The tune in the top 100 is from a giraffe hunting ceremony found on Youtube. The ceremony is performed by five female singers surrounded by dancing males and children. All five singers are depicted within the smaller circles of the painting above, one of the larger ones I've made in a while. The painting is superimposed on a found canvas that was originally used to paint a family portrait on. Footsteps, hand prints, and the ages of the family members were painted and printed onto the canvas that also had a bunch of circles painted on it. The circles I used unaltered to paint the portraits of female San singers, the composition thereby was predetermined.

Internet Art

Princess Nokia
12 x 16 inches, oil on canvas paper, 2016

Internet Art, a movement in the tradition of subversive anti-art groups going back to the Dadaists, is a fairly recent development in art art history. Even though there already is now "Post-Internet Art," the artists associated with Internet Art (or Net-Art) are still young and vibrant. The most interesting artists to emerge from this movement are a loose conglomerate of women, all now in their early thirties, associated with third-wave feminism. Recently I presented a two hour talk at the Art Center of Bonita Springs on 21st century art which was centered around three of the artists involved in the group mentioned above: Genevieve Belleveau, Ann Hirsch, and Jillian Mayer. Other noteworthy artists associated with these include Angela Washko and Faith Holland. To my own surprise I found the latter included within my Facebook friends. I had met her in New York in 2008, when both of us had exhibitions at White Columns. While a nice platform to follow one's career, she also provides me with updates about what's new and interesting in cultural New York. That's where I found the video Tomboy by Princess Nokia.

When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts...

Fiona Apple
10 x 8 inches, oil on wood, 2016

Air Sitar

Zohra Bai (of Agra)
8 x 1o inches, oil on board, 2016

From a photograph that may depict Zohrabai Agrewali (1836-1913). Zohra Bai is from Agra, not to be confused with another Zohrabai, who was a classical singer in Hindi cinema. There are many pictures of Zohrabai Ambalewali (1918-1990) available. Zohra Bai of Agra has amazing long hands and in interpreting the photograph I purposefully left out the sitar to focus attention to her right hand. Later I also removed the toddler on her knee and held in place by her left hand. Not just air sitar then but also air baby. The left hand was left in place and feels strangely out of place (it still needs a little work but the position won't be altered). The song represented, Dadurwa Bolay Mor Shor Karat recorded in 1910, is of course not about her hands but about her voice, which as sinuous as her hands.

M.I.A. Stencil

M.I.A.
stencil on paper, 2016

A stencil per semester to trade with students, this will make it six. The second of M.I.A.

The Competition

Jennie Williams and Natalie Frost
12 x 16 inches, oil on canvas paper, 2015

Jennie Williams and Natalie Frost (separated in the painting) are holding hands while performing a Katajjaq, a throat-singing game of imitation. A boy holds up a microphone. The singer who first laughs or misses a beat loses. I don't remember who wins, it doesn't matter.

Medieval Music

Barbara Sukowa as Hildegard von Bingen
7" x 7.5", watercolor on paper, 2015

Women, during the middle ages, attained influential and high ranking positions. Hildegard von Bingen was the head of a monastry, communicated with the highest authorities, and wrote a number of important books both on secular (medical and herbal) and religious topics. She was the composer of a number of musical works including what is considered the first opera, and was also a scientist. As a woman she could be considered as a so called ‘Renaissance man.’ The film Vision (Margarethe von Trotta, Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen, Germany, 2009) is based on the writings of Hildegard von Bingen and maintains therefore a high level of historical accuracy. The film has a strong feminist vantage point. Hildegard von Bingen is played by Barbara Sukowa. The music in the film is not von Bingen’s but the group Sequentia, an ensemble specializing in medieval music, recorded the complete works of Hildegard von Bingen in the 1990s. Eight CDs were filled to the max, O orzchis Ecclesia is the 15th and final song from the second CD Voice of the Blood.
The watercolor depicting the actress Barbara Sukowa will be reproduced in You Are an Artist! to be published in August of this year.

2016

Confusionism

Beth Orton
18" x 24.5", watercolor on poster, 2015

We have now the post-postmodernist era, post-internet art, metamodernism, zombie formalism, hypermodernism, and post-capitalism. From looking at it you can't distinguish post-internet art from post-internet non art, happily exploited by the commercialization of the internet. The characteristic of metamodernism is that it has characteristics of both modernism and postmodernism, floating between idealism and realism, between “a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.” [Vermeulen, van den Akker, 2010] Our culture in simply confusing, we have learned that truth subjective and illusive, and that falsehood is true. We have learned that identity is flexible, we can't distinguish between human nature and the human condition, we don't know what is knowledge and what is experience. It's all a big blur. There's an overload of information and images. There's too much (art). How to navigate? Rather than to cry about it we should embrace this condition of confusion. Doesn't the lack of any certainty create a sense of freedom? We know too that this era of post-postmodernism will end, perhaps there will be a future philosopher who, like Confucius, will make sense of this mess, and provide spiritual stability. Until then: let's enjoy this period of confusionism.

The watercolor of Beth Orton was painted on a poster with a reproduction of a work by Ikki Matsumoto featuring three spoonbills. The portrait was painted in the ground (negative space) that is the bodies of the spoonbills, which is at the same time the figure (positive space). The top 100 song: Safe in Your Arms from Comfort of Strangers.

Airto

Airto
16" x 12", oil on canvas paper, 2015

The painting of Airto was created on top of a landscape demo done in a new episode of landscape painting at the Alliance in Fort Myers. The landscape is situated in my back yard but was painted from memory. I turned it upside down to have Airto emerge out of water. I just added some waves to make the landscape become a reflection of itself. The top 100 song is called Andei (I Walked) and comes from the double album The Essential Airto featuring Flora Purim & Special Friends from 1976. The special friends are Hermeto Pascoal, Ron Carter, and Sivuca. There is a second version of Andei on the album on which Airto's wife Flora Purim performs her characteristic scat singing style. Usually I'd pick a version with a woman's voice but here I didn't. I guess I'm not a big fan of scat singing. I've painted Flora Purim before in a double portrait with Hermeto Pascoal but never Airto Moreira. It's a beautiful song.