What’s up is my next project. A lot of times a song pops into by Apple AirPod while walking my wonderful friend for life, Zelda, our Irish setter mixed poodle. And something in it, either the lyrics or the melody, catches the current mood I am in. That is how I keep on, keeping on. This time, my next project song came to my attention after listening to my Spotify Discover playlist. The song I heard on that playlist was a new cover by Dolly Parton of the song What’s Up. I have long ago added the original version of What’s Up by 4 Non Blondes in my Like playlist. Therefore, it has been there, but the Dolly Partons version surprised me. Then I saw that Linda Perry, who wrote and sang the original 4 Non Blondes version, was accompanying Dolly. That gave Dolly’s cover a lot of credibility and the confirmation I needed to spend the next few weeks working with this music.

I want to keep this artwork small. That means I will power my cover music with my standard 2 watt stereo system. To keep this project smaller in overall length, I first thought of installing the speakers on the backside of the main canvas. Instead, to give this work depth (a must for this art) I will lay the left and right speaker canvases on top of the main canvas instead. Also, because of the low number of notes, I am going with 3.5 inch in size. Along with the added speaker boxes, that will push this artwork’s length to around 6 feet. Still, compared to most of my projects, this one is small.

The pink repeating words “What’s goin on” dominate the image of the main canvas,” This is was my first time use of acrylic marker pens. I choose the color pink for this music which is performed by 4 non-blondes. Considering how many of my artworks include words, finding this easy to use, hopefully archival writing option took a long ago to find. Being the unknown, unknown artist, without a fine arts degree, has its consequences. Upon looking closer, Into the black background I have also scratched into the paint those same words, “What’s going on,” To note I left the question mark off the artwork to allow the viewer the flexibility to query their meaning.

It is only recently I have created a separate worksheet, alongside with my sheet music. In the past, I would print out my entire cover music and then outline the part in the sheet music the visual would be sampling.

Scott Von Holzen