It’s so hard to say Goodbye was hard to paint, and I must say I am glad to say goodbye to this artwork. This project stretched out over a month starting before the Holidays, and ending in the middle of January.  My original idea was to pay tribute to those of our family that past in 2015, and this artwork ended up being an experiment in woodworking, and attaching wood to canvas in interesting ways. Now, I do not know what I have here.  Fortunately Time may help me understand what the final meaning of this painting will be in my eyes and those of the viewer.

In the way I handled the color in this artwork I see a similarity to the recently completed Embraceable you. My reasoning for using solid coloring for the music flow cam from my use of so much wood.  I ended up spending a lot of time producing all the custom wood pieces for this music.  My thinking then became that by keeping the coloring simpler this would be a simple, clean look,  and help save time.  Although, I still ended up going three weeks over my goal, I would say much of that spent time was for reasons not related to this Art.

I like the use of the wood, because of its thickness accomplishes an important goal of mine to improve the depth of an artwork, which it does,  far better than  applying paint in coats.  Of course,  I saw a lot of thick paint in the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, and I did take a long look at the work of Gerhard Richter, but heavily applied paint at best became a layering technique for me, because thick paint reminds me too much of past abstract musical art, the antithesis of what this Art stands for.

Bottom line, It’s so hard to say Goodbye, is an experimental and transitional artwork, in the use of wood add-on pieces in different ways.

Of interest,  I received this on the 15th from WordPress:

I must say blogging this Art into my sixth year has been educational, difficult, demanding, frustrating, tiring, worrisome, and most important a wonderful tool for documenting the real purpose for starting this blog.  I still have much more blogging to do. Vincent Van Gogh wrote 903 letters, and this post will be my 447.

Without any doubt, I know that the best is yet to come.

Scott Von Holzen