The artist Sia released this “bouncy party anthem” in 2015. This music continues its popularity to this day. Cheap Thrills is big, with almost 1 billion video views on YouTube, and on Spotify, Cheap Thrills has played over 1.7 billion times. Definitely a catchy pop song. In choosing what music to paint I take popularity into consideration. More important, the connection to the music’s rhythm along with the music’s lyrics plays a greater role in my choice of spending weeks turning music into an artwork. I did not know who or what Sia was until now. I ended up listening, for the first time, to other music by her. The quality of her music, lyrics, and video performances convinced me that Sia is cool.

Cheap Thrills is the second in a series of at less eight dinky artworks. Smaller size works will improve my applications chances for one-person exhibitions. My guess is I will need a minimum of ten examples of this art to show. I hope that eight tiny works along with two larger artworks will fit (it will be tight) in our Jeep Cherokee. Because each of these artworks plays the music they are portraying, and to fill blank wall space, my exhibition request will be to space all the artworks six to eight feet apart. It is important to separate the sound of the music. If the wall space is available, I would like to hang one larger work between two smaller works on each side.

As mentioned, this song is big, and in that thinking the artwork and the music box should have also been big. Instead, it is small, and so will be the music. That is a compromise I made to improve the possibilities of showing this art. “Show,” that one word, is the key to moving this art out of the studio. Look to Show, apply to show, show, show.

When I looked at the image above, hanging on my studio wall, it reminded me of my initial feeling when I first looked at my first small artwork, A Day. It didn’t impress me. It did not command attention, felt overwhelmed, and looked out-of-place hung on the large white studio wall. Then I tried to attach the two sections of the music, pictured below. That is when I ran into a problem. The music for this artwork is larger than A Day’s music. That caused an issue with the, glued in place, note stems of the two music sections interfering with each other. In order to find a fit, I had to shift the top musical notes to the left and the bottom notes to the right. Magnets hold each section in place. Unexpectantly I ended up placing them far off of the canvas. Extending the music this aggressively gave the artwork a less boxer, wider rectangle look, typical of my larger works. That was something I should have thought of earlier in the works design. Finally, different from A Day, I went with a larger eight inches by twenty-four inch hanging canvas. When painted, this will add to the physical look of this small piece.

Scott Von Holzen