Month: September 2011

More Than You Know 24inches by 6 feet.

More is moving along without any long pauses.  A point to be made, is that the stem over the left musical object comes directly from the beams from L’estro Armonico:

After finishing the Vivaldi work, the idea was to repeat the abstract look of the beams, when working on Baby Love; instead they looked sully and out of place for the music.  That lead to search for other ideas, ending up with the surprising choice of the Hans Hofmann style beams. Although, the beams in Baby Love  worked quite well they lacked movement. They looked pretty, and organized, but just do not add to the flow of the work. And then there is this other problem with abstracted beams. Music has organization and working with abstracted beams only worked well when they where limited to shapes resembling the fairly natural musical look of narrow rectangles.  Yes, I understand up to this point in all of the history of artist’s painting music, that the excepted style is abstraction; but this art is going a different way, and replicating sheet music has never been acceptable.

Listening to Threshold – Little For Me  & then Gina Sicilia  singing Rest Of My Days.

So, with More it because apparent some other method of painting the beams was needed and finding that Kandinsky artwork, made that happen. Now, the beams in More are not only eye catching, like in Baby Love, but they have the added look of increasing the flow of the canvas.

That moves this art away from the abstracted beams. Since the method of using abstraction in this art, has evolved from a number of other previous attempts, it was thought that this could be tried on the lone stems.  The thought was by creating  little vertical abstractions, this would add interest, and variety to this canvas.  The issue became apparent, stepping back and looking at the entire work:  that the two different shaft designs interrupted the flow. The  advantage of consistent stems is apparent in the simple straight forward look and design of those green shafts in L’Estro.

Listening to Dinah Washington – More Than You Know &  to Jaco Pastorius – Wiggle Waggle (never heard of him)

This next image, created after pausing this blog entry, is the solution to improve the flow of this work.  A thin bright green line along the side of the stems was all that was needed to reconnect this image. Listening to Tina Turner – Better Be Good To Me & James Brown – Sex Machine

Now, happy with the progress of this work, it is time to figure out what can be done with the circles. Since More Than You Know, is a fairly soft music, they will probably be painted with that thought in mind.  Except…..It never ends the way the thinking starts.

Listening to Queen – We Are The Champions and finishing this blog with It’s A Man’s Man’s World by Seal

Scott Von Holzen

More than you know is taking a small inspiration from  Composition 8 by Vasily Kandinsky. Listening to Sarah Vaughan – More Than You Know.  This is a small progress note.  The beams (the objects above the circles) are  interesting in design and coloring.  Using combinations of different jars of magenta, yellow, orange, and some reds, mixed for different shades, the idea is to finish them in a style that is own my this artist.

The image color is fairly accurate, accept the white areas along the edges that have a blue cast that obviously should not be there. Therefore the whole image is titled somewhat to the blue side. It is important to the viewer, although everyone’s view is different, that it is know that this artist is trying to present his paintings  accurately, considering these are simple snapshots.  This image is taken with a Canon 7D camera, ISO 100, with a single Canon 580EXII attached flash.  There are white bounce boards along the bottom of the image to help the lighting.  The Canon flash is titled straight up to bounce of the white diffused ceiling title. That is that technical update.

Listening to Sarah Vaughan – More Than You Know.  The Kandinsky beams are interesting and a color challenge.  Using combinations of different jars of magenta, yellow, orange, and some reds, mixed for different shades, this artist’s desire is to finish the beams with a look that is more his own.

Del Shannon -Runaway ’67
Book of Love – Boy
Freddie King – You’ve Got To Love Her With A Feeling

Another consideration is that this music, generally, has been sung more by women. Because of Sarah Vaughan’s version of this music the color choices, will for certain, lean more to the feminine side of the color chart.  The beams, even in this early stage, are reflecting that preference. More Than You Know is not  a moody piece, nor bouncy, so the use of colors to move this work from right to left will be (at this moment), softer, and easy on the eyes.

Wildfire – Michael Martin Murphey.  This is kind of a long, long time favorite, maybe because of the piano.

John Mayer – Gravity
Fall Out Boy – Tiffany Blews

Scott Von Holzen
(all the music listed in these posts are in this artist’s favorite music playlist, which at this moment totals 1285 songs)