S_V_H Final Images & cover for Yellow

Published on by Scott Von Holzen

The new project Yellow offered the opportunity to use up some of my many shades of acrylic yellow. Or at less I could use those yellows that I had not dried out over the years. I have not used a lot of yellow in this art until this year. I have two music boxes where yellow is the dominate color. The other 2023 yellow was an experimental vertical for a Bach piece in which the music drops quickly. I thought the color yellow would add emphasis to the music.

Back of Yellow showing all the disconnects needed to break down this artwork for travel.

I work long on these artworks that when I finish them, I truly feel finished and wish only to move on. Here are a couple of reflective thoughts on this work.

My original idea for this project was to make a shorter and smaller work around six feet. Unlike the previous project, Closer, I did not want to do another long horizontal. Although that did not happen, even though early, I chose 4inch 2way speakers with a 2 Watt stereo system instead of the 5×7 speakers and 20watt used in Closer.

I always chose for the visual part of the artwork an interesting part of the cover music. But since the visual part of the artwork only samples a small piece of the music box, that part has to portray a stand out part of the cover, and more so also presents an interesting visual.

For this music box, there was only one section of the cover music that I thought would work. The pre-chorus has the visual look along with a nice beginning and ending (seen below in the worksheet). This choice then required a large reduction in the notation’s size to fit all the music. Even doing that, the artwork horizontally would have stretched to 114 inches. Yellow would be longer than the artwork Closer. To resolve this, I divided Yellow into two parts (similar to Closer) to under the 6 foot travel length. Then, to reduce Yellow’s length, I overlap the two sections to bring the artwork under 8 feet.

Sample taken from 8 pages cover of Yellow
The visual sample of the pre-chorus (seen in the edited sheet music above) starts at 26 seconds and ends at 45 seconds.

My other comment about this artwork was because of its divided sections needed for traveling. It was a learning and challenging experience to wire, and to balance for hanging, the two different arms of this work.

The speaker and controls wiring for Yellow

Scott Von Holzen