This artwork starts its build from the music of Toto.  For this first image you are seeing three separate pieces stacked up.  The top and the bottom aluminum sections, with the covered canvas for print protection, is for the music.  The only lyric, the word Africa,  will be in the middle section. Africa looked to be an artwork over eight feet in length.   Another long and narrow artwork caused me to think it was time to change the elongated structure common in my artworks.   I decided to break a apart the music, and stack it creating more of a rectangle artwork.  In order to connect, and separate both pieces of the music, I choose to add a wider middle size of canvas.  I bolted two 10 x 20 inches canvases together for the background, and to be the base for the two musical sections.  For this middle background canvas, to give this area value,  I choose the Serengeti to be the visual theme.  After a lot of taping and using a squeegee to spread a number of paint colors I got the look of a grassy plain,  with a few green trees in the shape of a musical staff, that worked.

The official, music video of Africa by Toto, is awful, dated, with a poor story line and token African references.  I prefer this later live version for the first 4 minuets or so, and then the rest is filler.

 

 

Better, is this video of  AFRICA, by the Angel City Chorale.  Africa has a Gospel sound, that for me, is the emotional appeal of this music.

 

Scott Von Holzen