Do Souls Multiply?

Rosalia Martinez/Shuar woman (after Luzuy)

Every twentieth or thirtieth painting or so I feel like I'm painting someone I know other than the one who is actually being painted. It happened in this painting while working on the portrait of Rosalia Martinez; all the way down the start of the process I felt like I was painting someone who once was a student in a drawing class of mine. The Shuar woman on the right does not feel like anyone I know but last year, when painting another Shuar woman, also photographed by Philippe Luzuy and published in Visages de Bronze, she continued to have the spirit of the neighbor of a friend. This then leads me to a novel conclusion that there are about 400 thousand different souls in the world. It is also a novel explanation for a mystery that I have been wondering about: If reincarnation is real, how is it possible then that there are so many more people alive today then there were, say, a thousand years ago. In other words: Do souls multiply?

All kidding aside; Rosalia Martinez wrote the commentary on the CD Les voix du monde, une anthologie des expressions vocales for a recording by Philippe Luzuy called "ujaj", a track that was listed in a top 100 numerous times. As it was before, I had to be inventive to find appropriate images. Last year I ended up painting Jean Rouch together with that Shuar woman who looked like the neighbor. Jean Rouch, as it turned out, had harassed women and would have faced consequences today in the years since the me-too movement. Philippe Luzuy had extensively worked for Jean Rouch. An option I had this year was to paint Paul Morand, who wrote the introduction to Visages de Bronze, but I quickly realized that Morand had even a worse civil record than Rouch did. Paul Morand was a Nazi collaborator during the second world war. I never have been able to find a photo of Luzuy himself yet.

Monkeys

Cebus and Spider Monkey from the Amazon Rainforest

Top 100 2022, #52: Kayabí: Animal and Bird Imitations from the album Music from Mato Grosso, Brazil, recorded by Edward M. Weyer, Jr, 1954, Folkways Records. Two men perform imitations of an uru, a quail like bird, urutao, a poor-me-one bird, a saki monkey, a spider monkey, a giant otter, a cebus monkey, and a sclater's curassow. Neither liner notes or Google searches have any images of the two (or any) Kayabí performers or Edward Weyer, hence the opportunity for me to paint animals. 

Are animal sounds music? Are animal imitations music? Are human imitations of animal sounds more music than that of the animals themselves?
 

Try it again!

Andrea Quispe Chura/John Cohen, 2023

Andrea Quispe Chura/John Cohen, 2021

Cover of Music of Thailand/Howard Kaufman, 2023

Cover of Music of Thailand/Howard Kaufman, 2021

I'm onto the last dozen paintings for the Top 100 2022, and it gets harder to find appropriate images. Unlike last year it isn't simply one painting per one song now, but a more flexible concept. The two latest paintings are from the same source images I had used last year to illustrate the same songs that recur this year from Music of Thailand, and Mountain Music of Peru. Both double portraits illustrate well the concept I used for the Top 100 2021; that of the juxtaposition of the recorded with the recorder, and, in this case too, the photographed and photographer. The indigenous tribal person and the western academic. I don't know if I like the new paintings better or worse, what do you think?

No outography!

Nico/John Cale

The painting of Nico and Cale sure looks like it was intended as an outography, but it's not. The painting was intended as a double portrait, with both their shadows moving across the halfway mark, as I had done in 2007 with a double portrait of the White Stripes. The two black shapes representing Nico and Cale were not cut away but rather added. It's more of a stereoscopic image than an outograph. The source was a photo of the two with Brian Eno and Kevin Ayers. The quartet had collaborated on June 1, 1974, from which album Baby's on Fire, by Eno, once was my number 1. But this was a long, long, time ago. The year 2022 features Nico's Secret Side in its top 100. Secret Side comes from Nico's solo album The End... and was produced by John Cale also in 1974.

Since I'm at I might as well forward some other painting I finished over the last two months. There are about eighteen I did not (yet) write about in these pages. I made a series of three double portrait paintings representing four songs from the CD series Siberie on Music du Monde. Three from Volume 4: Kamchatka: Tambours de danse de l'extreme-orient Siberien, and one from Volume 8: Chants rituels des nomades de la Taiga. Two of these paintings, featuring Ivikovna Sajnav with Henri Lecomte, and Anna Vasilevna Kolegova with Irina Khristoforovna Kolegova, I had already done some months ago using images I had used before in earlier versions of the Top 100. I had ordered the the Volume 8 CD from a seller in Switzerland which took forever to make it to my house. I ordered the CD mainly because I needed images. No images of any of the singers in the series can be found on-line the the CD booklets contain several. I knew I would be waiting to post about the first two paintings until I was able to do the third. The singer in the Top 100 from Volume 8 is Uljana Nikoraevna Vasilova. A photograph of Vasilova was not included in the booklet but several others were, including Oktjabrina Vladimirovna Naumova, who had been in a Top 100 several times, and really was due for a painting. She is paired with Alexandra Lavrillier, who assisted Lecomte, and recorded about half the tracks on the CD.

Alexandra Lavrillier/Oktjabrina Vladimirovna Naumova

Ikovna Sajnav/Henri Lecomte

Anna/Irina Kolegova

Woman with a Pearl Necklace (Flora)

Airto (Moreira)/Flora Purim

Some of the most iconic work from art history is portraiture. The painted sculpture bust of Nefertiti by one of the first artists we know by name: Thutmose; the Egyptian Roman Era Fayum mummy portraits of the first and second centuries; the Mona Lisa; Girl with a Pearl Earring; self-portraits by Rembrandt and van Gogh; old master portraits like those by Goya; new master portraits by Alice Neel; Lucian Freud; and so many others, make portraiture a most important genre in the history of art. Sometimes a single portrait of art history is a conscious reference for one of my Top 100 paintings, but more often a host of unconscious references pass the revue while working on a portrait. What I have available to me, unlike historical artists, is photography in combination with the internet. I have access to pretty much every face of every individual out there in the world. For this portrait of a married couple: Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, I didn't need the internet. Their portraits appear, as photographs, on the back of the LP: The Essential Airto, featuring Flora Purim. [Buddah, 1976] There are five portraits on the back, all tightly framed in on oval. Hermeto (Pascoal), Ron Carter, and Sivuca, appear next to Purim and Airto. I've been playing that record a few times and the portrait of especially Purim kept staring at me. I needed to paint her, even though my favorite song from the album, Andei (I Walked), did not quite have enough points to be included in the Top 100 2022.

 

FC Weiland

Frits Weiland/Karel Appel

Poeme Barbare is like the art of Karel Appel; agressive, intense, uncompromising, and Dutch. I can relate to some of these characteristics. Frits Weiland is a Dutch composer and sound artist, who assists Karel Appel on the LP Musique Barbare. The filmmaker Jan Vrijman, and photographer Ed van der Elsken documented the making of it.

Leon Williams/Sarah Webster Fabio

Sarah Webster Fabio is an American poet who recorded several collections of poetry with a musical background. Chromo is from the LP Jujus/Alchemy of the Blues. [Folkways, 1976] The musicians on the record are some of the children of Webster Fabio and some of their friends. They called themselves "Don't Fight the Feeling" for the occasion. The band is led by an experienced and professional jazz musician: Leon Williams.

Alan Vega/Alex Chilton

Fat City is the eight-and-a-half minute opening track from the LP Cubist Blues [2.13.61, 1996] by Alan Vega, together with Alex Chilton and Ben Vaughn. Alan Vega is best known for his work with Martin Rev in Suicide, but not not so much as a solo act, even though he recorded a large string of albums. Both Chilton and Vega have been in the Top 100 several times with their respected bands Big Star, and Suicide.


 

The Glitch

There is such a thing as glitch art. It consists of willfully manipulating a computer as to cause image processing errors. My 1997 graduation thesis was called Painting in the Digital Era in which I explored how a computer interprets visual data. Within my experiments I was especially interested in the so-called 'glitches' that happened when data were interpreted differently from my expectations. Whimsically I concluded that there were forces at work inside the machine that were unintended by the creators of them. Those forces were perhaps archaic structures that could be found anywhere in nature and in the products created by nature, including humans, something like Turing patterns or fractals. The thesis was a text supporting various paintings and digital art works I created at the time. The paintings were a reversal of the pattern of digital image processing programs (such as photoshop) that are based on the history of image processing (graphic design) of the material world. I'm interested in the glitches of a computer handling images, more so than the willfully manipulating of it for aesthetic pleasure, although I recognize how people are drawn in by these glitches and want to control them. They are beautiful in a way that the outcome of surrealist games are beautiful, and any result of chance operations are beautiful, exactly because they're unexpected. The unexpected will delight anyone.

Stanley Diamond/Anaguta drummer

Above is one result of my experiments with this concept. It's done with a little hesitance. I've done a few others with results that did not satisfy me. That's the problem of the glitch; it doesn't always do what you want it to do. The machine is in nature formal, it acts on forms rather than ideas. The opposite of formal is not informal (in art) but content. Form and content, the ingredients of an artwork. When I try to impersonate a machine, I obviously can't be 100% objective (formal.) The argument is here that the machine isn't 100% formal either. Stanley Diamond, btw, is an important anthropologist. Surprisingly there aren't many pictures on line, so I used the same as last year, illustrating a song that was there last year too: Women with mortar and pestle, a recording of Nigerian Anaguta women. On the LP Music of the Jos Plateau and Other Regions of Nigeria, the track is coupled with Two Anaguta drummers. Olga Diamond (love that name) took a photograph during the performance, on which I based the musician on the right.

An Armenian Case

Adrina Otero/Zabelle Panosian

Zabelle Panosian was a Armenian-American soprano born in Turkey in 1891. She recorded eleven songs in 1917 and 1918 that have recently been reissued together with a book titled I am a Servant of Your Voice. The CD has 21 tracks, I don't own it (just bought the one track in my Top 100, Groung, from bandcamp), which means the authors probably found some alternate takes from the Colombia sessions. The song Groung (meaning 'crane') is reputedly a secret song more than 400 years old and sounds truly mesmerizing. Zabelle Panosian, the Armenian refugee from Turkey, continued through her long life (she died in 1986), supporting the Armenian case, and at the end of her life, left a significant amount to the Amenian-American community. The left half of the painting is modeled after a publication shot of the dancer/actress Adrina Otero, daughter of Zabelle Panosian. The image depicts her as a flamenco dancer. After a twenty year hiatus there is once again flamenco music in the Top 100 (see this post from a month ago.)
 

I.M. Gal Costa

Caetano Veloso/Gal Costa

Gal Costa died just a few months ago at the age of 77 in Sao Paulo. I only learned about it a week ago when preparing for this painting and updating my archive. Back in my old radio days in the Netherlands I used to know it quite fast when a musician had died, my friend Wim, once a year, in January, did a radio special playing music from musicians who had died that year. He kept a list all year, and of course I was being kept up to date. Not so much anymore, if it isn't news for the big media, I probably won't hear about it. I'm actually surprised the passing of Gal Costa was not newsworthy enough, as she had been an important figure in Brazilian, and world music. I had never painted her before and her Relance, a b-side of her hit Milho Verde, written by Caetano Veloso, is her first ever listing in a Top 100. Together with Veloso, Maria Bethania (Veloso's sister), Os Mutantes, and Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa formed the core of the Tropicalia movement in Brasil, a mix of bossa nova, samba, and rock 'n' roll. The version of Relance in my list is a live TV performance with the group Dumingunhos from 1970.
 

Positive Body Image

Janis Ian/Nina Simone

Janis Ian and Nina Simone were friends at some point. Then they fell out. Who knows what happened exactly but Simone was known to have a bad temper and was later diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. While in the process of finishing the above painting, I re-listened to Simone's cover of Ian's song Stars, and Maria, my spouse, commented "she must be on drugs." I never considered that and thought of the song, that Simone paired with the famous hit Feelings at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, as a brilliant and intense performance. Maria was right though, towards the end of the 17 minute rendition, Simone herself alludes to drug use. A review on the Guardian confirms that Simone was sometimes incomprehensible and unsteady during the performance. Ian's original, from 1974, is a manifesto of what is called today "positive body image," as was her most famous hit At 17. The message spread by Ian and Simone had been analogous at times, and Simone acknowledges Ian in the performance by mentioning her name in the same breath with Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday.
 

The "gentlemen" of ethnology

 

Jaap Kunst/Robert von Heine-Geldern

Jaap Kunst (1891-1960) was an official of the Dutch colonial government in Indonesia. Kunst had a law degree, was a musician, and an ethnographer. Robert von Heine-Geldern (1886-1968) an Austrian nobleman carrying the title of Freiherr, a leftover title from the Holy Roman Empire. He was a grandnephew of the poet Heinrich Heine, and a noted archaeologist and ethnographer. Both specialized in Southeast Asian culture. Von Heine-Geldern introduced Southeast Asian studies as an academic field while Kunst coined the term ethnomusicology in 1955 (to this day underlined in red—misspelled—by Google.) Kunst was the first one to record Indonesian gamelan music. The natural companion to Jaap Kunst in this painting would have been a certain Mr. Hobbel, a Dutch army official serving in Indonesia who recorded (or collected) the music of the Moluccas that is featured in the top 100. Kunst, in the liner notes to an album in the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music series dedicated to Indonesia, suggest to the Barbar song in question, an "extremely ancient cultural connexion [sic]." In the same paragraph he mentions von Heine-Geldern as having demonstrated similar conclusions. Mr. Hobbel's identity remains unsure to me (a photo doesn't seem to exist, not on-line at least.) Jaap Kunst became interested in folk music while, as a young man, vacationing in Terschelling, an island in the North of the Netherlands. He recorded an album for Moses Asch's Folkways label dedicated to the music of the Netherlands. Several tunes I can sing-a-long with including my shower classic Drie Schuintamboers.

Into the Black (The story of Johnny Spud)

Mark Mothersbaugh/Neil Young

Neil Young is forever linked with the state of Ohio because of his song Ohio (four dead in Ohio) in response to the Kent State shootings in 1970. This was years before he hooked up with Kent State alumni band DEVO (Jerry Casale was in the midst of the chaos in 1970.) DEVO performs with Neil Young in the film Human Highway. Mark Mothersbaugh (as Booji Boy) sings Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black), he substitutes Johnny Rotten in the lyrics for Johnny Spud. He also introduced Neil Young to the term "rust never sleeps" which became the title of the album that featured Hey Hey, My My.