Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas is the  theme for this years Christmas painting. When completed I will then put together a Christmas card to be sent to those who purchased a painting from me.  Inside that card will be a small canvas print of Have yourself a merry little Christmas, signed and numbered.

This music was first introduce to the public by the beautiful 21-year-old Judy Garland in the 1944 movie Meet Me in St. Louis.

Here is an equally beautiful and talented Christina Aguilera along with Brian McKnight:

This first image show the finish of the basic background.  What I mean by basic is that this step is about putting down paint across the artwork, with the goal of covering up much of the white canvas.  Next up,  I will be taking what I learned in the last artwork, and  break up the horizontal striping using curved and straight shaded lines  This will add some interest to the background, and may even enhance the sense of movement of the music across the artwork.

I have said this a in a number of my blog entries,  that a major goal of each of these paintings is to try to emulate the music the art is portraying. That is pretty hard to do with out sound. Previous efforts  by artists to depict music mostly as abstractions, I believe, have missed this point:  an artwork may be depicting a Mozart Sonata,  or it could as likely be a scenic image of a Kansas dust storm just before a thunderstorm.  For me musical art is not an abstraction, but something that is real, and that visually depicts each piece of music in a unique way that connects the art to the music.  All of these artworks work to represent that singular look, and  feel of that one piece of music.  The success of each of these artworks brings me closer to my goal of picturing music’s spontaneity, emotion, and uniqueness, in a static, and silent art form.

Scott Von Holzen