Silver Bells is this years Christmas Painting. My original plan was to produce a mini-Christmas artwork probably about one foot in length.  I ended up choosing a larger 8 inch by 24 inch in length canvas,  with no clear reason other than I forgot my original plan.

Using a larger canvas with such a small amount of music, better suited for a mini artwork, cause me to look for ways to fill up some space. Well, as you can see, with much effort, I covered the background using large pieces of wood.  Because of their length and size of all this extra wood, I had issues with keeping a balanced look. What I did to balance the work, with the third group of two notes,  I turned the stems  down instead of the more normal up. Than with the fourth two note group, I turned my tie, that boxy object covering the notes, also down, instead of doing a more normal above the music curve wood piece. I would have not done any of this if I had stuck with the original plan, but here I am. To move on to the fun parts of this music, I am going to cover all those large plain-looking pieces of wood with a lot of  strips and shapes. When finished Silver Bells will be a bright, colorful, and undeniable another unmarketable Christmas painting.

Here is a Classic 1950’s version of Silver Bells, with Bob Hope as a mischievous Santa Clause, and that includes a dated insensitive action at 1:18, Ho! Ho!

I  angled the stems of the music back-en-forth as a symbol for a ringing bell.  Originally, I was going with Silver Bells  for the artworks words, but  realized that I had another sentence I could use : “Ring-a-ling,  hear them ring.”  The words Ring, ring, balance nicely, and are more fun visually, so that is the direction I am heading.

Scott