Once again, this is a small work. The music for this project is Zombie by the Cranberries. I have had an interest in this song for a long time, but I needed the right timing to spend the time to portray this music. That appears to have arrived. With the war in Ukraine and in Israel, and mass shooting after mass shooting in the United States, I felt why not? I am not trying to create a protest artwork, only living through my mood. That this music makes a statement can only add a little extra punch to the collateral damage that is priced in each of these projects.

The lead singer and writer of this music is the Irish singer Dolores O’Riordan. This song was her protest over the violence occurring in Northern Ireland. Researching the music and her story, I found, to my surprise, her tragic death at age 46. Knowing that, I hesitated to spend a month with this music. What made me move forward with this project was finding a dedicated cover of Zombie by Bad Wolves (never heard of them).

The girl in gold in the Bad Wolves cover comes from the official Cranberries Zombie video in which the girl is gold, is Dolores.

Another version of Zombie is by Brooklyn Duo. I thought would be a helpful to build my cover for it is also an instrumental. But all I took from their cover was the cello.

Over the years of painting music the primary requirement of the background was that it was long enough to support all the cover music notes that I was sampling. Then, in 2022, there was a noticeable change in my backgrounds. I wanted more depth in my work to truly separate my music notation from the flat two dimensionality of sheet music. I also felt that having my notation move out and back toward the viewer would better resemble the multi depths in the music’s sound. To help reach my artworks out from the wall, and also accommodate the speaker boxes, one simple technique I taught myself years ago was to stack my background canvases. The 2022 artwork, Crazy, is a good example of what I learned back in 2012. It was my Vivaldi’s Four Seasons series of thirteen very large artworks that I prominently developed this technique.

For this work I am using four different generic phrases that I found in the lyrics. I build their value on their repetitiveness. The viewer can either relate them to the original music, or let the repeating message they each represent mean whatever. For me I like the presenting my individual cursive style, that is or is not legible. That I couldn’t care less. My scribbling is fun, adds character and interest, and also depth to these artworks. What I write on these artworks directly connects me, and only me, to these paintings.

Scott Von Holzen