This image of the Bach project shows it sprawling out on the studio floor. At the top is the 16×24 inch canvas with a pallet painting after Van Gogh. This canvas will be hung on the wall. The rest of the music that drops off that canvas will then zig-zag its way down to the floor, to my canvas print of Van Gogh’s Olive Grove 1889 from the Kroller-Muller Museum in the Netherlands.

On Amazon there are several commercial available framed images of this olive grove on Amazon. They all seemed dark to me. Looking on line I found a public download of a higher pixel image of this Van Gogh artwork. Both previous artworks, Wildfire and then Shenandoah, contain purchased commercial prints of Van Gogh art. Having access to a higher quality image of Van Gogh’s Olive Grove artwork allowed me to adjust the colors and contrast. Whether I am accurate at less my print feels more like what I expect I would see if I could see this artwork in person.

My thinking about this project started with what can I do differently from what I have been doing, while still using up my stocked canvases. That wonderment was reinforced by my friend Jeff Nelson who lately has been encouraging me to get out of my box. He does not realize I still have a lot of stretched canvases to use. Since he is a professionally trained artist, I have found it difficult to explain the goals of this art to him, even though I have tried. It is not his fault; it is just that my approach differs from his. I will explain those differences in a later post. And yet, I was a little bored with the current design of my latest artworks.

That lead me to a change. My original plan with this artwork was to start with a small frame canvas hung on the wall that would never accommodate all of Bach’s notes. The extra notes would then drop off the canvas, falling alongside the wall to a piling up of Bach’s notes on the floor with a Van Gogh print laying among them. Instead of a pile of Bach, I will now mount my the print on a small, stretched canvas. Then, like I have done many times before, I will deepen the frame to hold what will become the artwork’s right-side speaker box, placed upright on the floor, below the wall-hung canvas.

UPDATE: 4-28 4:45PM

Every idea for a new project starts out fuzzy and optimistic that all problems, all issues, and all hurdles will eventually be resolved. That reasoning works for I will, as I have always done, complete what I started. My biggest issue with zig-zagging the music down from the top canvas was how to support it or not, and would that work? The final decision became I needed to support my falling notes. That is where the angled aluminum comes in.

Scott Von Holzen