This is the first image of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons,  Autumn Allegro third movement. This artwork consists of nine canvases for a total length of twelve feet ten inches. Since this is the last movement of Autumn, which is the season I am living in at this moment, I will be using a lot of the late  fall colors I see all around me. Today while out walking I picked up a number of leaves that I will keep for color references. What you are going to see in this background is a lot of earthy colors, faded greens, dirty yellows, and darker shades of red. The bright colors are for the music. I suppose it would be fine if I kept my entire pallet for this artwork like you see in the above images, but that would not be my current style. Generally, every color in the rainbow tries to find a spot in my works. Take a look at Keep on Loving you, and you will see what I mean.

I think this background will be fine for now.  Next up I will be applying a lot of stripping to give each canvas their own look. In their own strange way my strips relate to the lines of a staff in music notation, but the resemblance ends at that point.  I am not drawing the music I am depicting the flow only, but I do enjoy the comparison. The difference is my lines mean nothing, beyond adding interest to the artwork, unlike those five lines in a musical staff which represent a blank sheet of western musical notation.

The big think here is that I need to move a lot quicker with this work. Taking over two months to complete this one artwork, was not my original timing for this work. Stopping to do the Christmas canvas will slow this works progress, and because I am also working on a small work, all that is making me re-think a new Vivaldi in eight weeks. I could be destined to complete the first concerto of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, by the end of January.

Scott Von Holzen