Eilish!

 

Billie Eilish

I painted Billie Eilish today. There is context as to why, but I leave it at mentioning that her song Happier Than Ever, performed on SNL right before her twentieth birthday in 2021, is actually pretty bloody awesome. I made some alterations to my Carla Bley painting from last week too.

Carla Bley

IM: Carla Bley

Carla Bley, oil on canvas, 2023

Carla Bley died less than a week ago. Several websites I frequent, because of a similarity of musical preferences, dedicated space in her memory. I had never really listened to her music because, one day, maybe thirty years ago, I decided I didn't like it. I was so wrong, then. I might have been a bit of a misogynist, then too. I painted her right away, the first oil for the Top 100 2023. I have now rejected the plan to make a stencil print in an edition of five for all 100, yet I still like the stencil and I have not totally abandoned the concept. I did trace the Bley painting and cut a stencil. These are charming things and I will do something with these at some point.

Thus far the stencils have worked better integrated into larger wholes, than as individual prints. Below the stencil for Mary Sivurapik was used on a pillar outside my studio. The stencil print of Sivurapik, an Inuit throat singer, is below that one.

 

Mary Sivurapik, stencil print, 12 x 18 inches

The stencil I cut for Sun Ra also looks better in a large mural created in the classroom with a couple of students then it does as a print.

Sun Ra

"239" Sun Ra inserted in collaborative mural, stencils and spray paint on wall

 

Top 100 2023

 

Ashaninka (Campa) Indian, print, a/p, 18x12 each

While the Top 100 2022 is up at the Top 100 Archive & Studio gallery, I'm experimenting with stencils and hope to come up with a concept for the Top 100 2023. I've been working with stencils a lot lately and I feel like creating the top 100 as an edition this year. The stencils could then also function to paint the full Top 100 as a mural, I don't know. It may be too ambitious to create 100 matrices (stencils) but I'll keep experimenting and thinking until I have a solid concept. A recording of a group of Campa women resides at #1 in the current top 100 for the time being. If I were to use this print, I probably dedicate to a recording made by Gerald Weiss in 1963 of a female Ashaninka solo voice, that is also in the list. I've painted the image before. I now learned that Ashaninka and Campa are the same people living in Peru in the Upper Amazon border region with Brazil.

Breuker, Branca, and Young

Willem Breuker; Glenn Branca; La Monte Young

Breuker, Branca, and Young, numbers 13, 16, and 17 in the list of musicians for the year 2022. None are in the Top 100 (but all have been painted before.) Lots of negative space that begs for writing. I will sign it but I'll leave the writing to someone else.

Giovanna Daffini/Giovanna Marini

The second to last one for the top 100 2022 is a preview of 2023. Both Giovannas are in the Top 100 2023. I bought records of both performers while in Italy: Bella Ciao!

Marion Coutts/Gert-Jan Blom

Marion Coutts is a British sculptor, Gert-Jan Blom a Dutch musician and sound technician. Both played in the Dog Faced Hermans.


 

Wrapping up

Eva Rune/Jennie Tiderman Österberg

The Top 100 2022 paintings are nearly completed. The concept of the series of 100 paintings doesn't allow me to repeat individuals and everybody who needed to get painted had already been painted. For the last few paintings I am resorting to musicians who are listed in secondary lists such as the top 20 musicians, or the top 25 albums, or, like for the painting above, the 20 highest scoring musical traditions (field recordings.) Swedish kulning recordings were number 18 on that list, but not a single recording made it into the regular top 100. The 24 kulning points were neatly divided between two historical recordings (by Erin Lisslass and Karin Edvards-Johansson) and two contemporary ones (Eva Rune and Jennie Tiderman-Österberg.)

Badume's Band: Rudy Blas, Olivier Guénégo, Antonin Volson

Badume's Band is the band behind three separate songs in the list by Selamnesh Zéméné, my favorite concert of 2022. It is time to set a date for the exhibition of the 100 paintings.

 

Renaissance

Konstantin Simonovitch/Abbé Jean Revert

A friend asked me if my trip to Florence, Italy had an immediate impact on my painting practice. The influence will only be felt next year, when a number of tunes from records I bought in Florence will be listed in, and painted for, the Top 100 2023. I'm still working on the Top 100 2022, even though I had it nearly finished before I left for Florence a month ago. I had not been in Florence before, and of course, seeing these works that I've known for years from books for real did make an impact. No surprise here: portraiture is my favorite subject matter of the old masters. In portraiture, especially, the real makes a difference compared with a reproduction. The portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo did not disappoint, portraits by Titian were to me a great revelation, but to say that I now want to paint like them, no. I have seen a hundred and fifty years of photography history, and I have seen Warhol, Orlan, and Lucian Freud. If any technical matter influenced me it's from an analysis of painting in the Renaissance in a book I've read before flying over; the use of complementary colors as a ground before applying the final color. I kind of knew about but never experimented with it, until the above painting relating to music by Iannis Xenakis. The painting clearly does not have a finished look but I decided it had to be this way. Konstantin Simonovitch and Abbé Jean Revert direct the orchestra and choir respectively on a recording of Polla ta Dhina, a composition by Iannis Xenakis. Simonovitch, further more, directs the Ensemble Instrumental De Musique Contemporaine on Akrata, another Top 100 entry from the same album as Polla ta Dhina. The Simonovitch/Revert painting was the first one I painted since returning from Florence, but I also finished one of the Kirk family illustrating yet another Rahsaan Roland Kirk tune in the list of 100 recordings compiled in 2022. Dothaan Kirk was Roland Kirk's wife, Rory, their son, and Alena a granddaughter.

Rory, Alena, and Dorthaan Kirk

 

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.