Signed and dated, the only task left to do on Flowers is to add the LED light strip, which I will do in a couple of days. My main take away on this music box is I like the strong contrast between the canvas and the music. I will follow this trend into the future. The chosen colors work for the music and for the final lyrics I added the words “you can.” I forgot them at first and had to paint over sections to match the background to add them. I had the same issue with Make you Love Me when I chose the wrong color for that artworks lyrics. To my surprise, I could repaint and match the background for that work. That gave me the confidence to fix my word error on Flowers.

I will mention this one last time: I like this 30 x 40 inch sized artworks. What I mean by like is the look of the artwork because of its rectangle shape has the feeling of classical artworks. That works for me for two reasons. First, the size is large, but not too large to fit comfortably on a wall in any upscale home. Also, each finished artwork becomes the template for the next project, making production and storage a lot easier. I will continue this vertical look, that to me feels well balanced, and a radical change from the last 19 years of sheet music length art. This art current look is sophisticated, classy, and invitingly simple in appearance.

I stated in the video that much of today’s art, and this includes popular music, suffers from same old, same old overproduction. I acknowledge the high quality production skill and craftmanship, but find the results, at last, to be boring. Beautiful and attention grabbing art is being created. It just all seems like one continuing movie sequel, that charges more for diminishing returns. And then there are the artist statements that seem desperate to add depth and meaning to the work. I can go on, and on about ” much ado about nothing,” or “in the moment” art and music, but I think this quote for Peggy Lee’s 1969 classic hit sums up my feelings about today’s art and music:
“Is that all there is
Is that all there is
If that’s all there is, my friends
Then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is” – Peggy Lee

For giggles here are examples of random artist’s statements online, with little thought that I quickly pulled from the largest Gallery in the world, Gagosian. The actual art I see as “oh well, this is the art that is oozing money out of galleries today?“

“The Baroque always connects two extremes, like light and shadow, in one body, one painting. History outside against a wild body inside, cultured and uncultured, cooked and uncooked, greed and expressionism, rationalism and irrationality, cold and hot.“
—Adriana Varejão

Painting is an act that connects reality and consciousness. It is more than a collective codification of signs. It is a performance that awakens the delirium of vision.
—Richard Wright

Most are afraid of total freedom, of nothingness, of life. You try to control everything, but nature is uncontrollable. It doesn’t matter how you express yourself (words, image, electric guitar), what matters is that you have something to express.
—Steven Parrino

(If you have a long enough attention span, this statement says a lot about today’s art and music production for me)
Christopher Wool is best known for his paintings of large, black, stenciled letters on white canvases, but he possesses a wide range of styles; using a combined array of painterly techniques, including spray painting, hand painting, and screen-printing, he provides tension between painting and erasing, gesture and removal, depth and flatness. By painting layer upon layer of whites and off-whites over screen-printed elements used in previous works—monochrome forms taken from reproductions, enlargements of details of photographs, screens, and Polaroids of his own paintings—he accretes the surface of his pressurized paintings while apparently voiding their very substance. Only ghosts and impediments to the field of vision remain, each fixed in its individual temporality. Through these various procedures of application and cancellation, Wool obscures the liminal traces of previous elements, putting reproduction and negation to generative use in forming a new chapter in contemporary painting. His paintings can therefore be defined as much by what they are not and what they hold back as what they are.

Scott Von Holzen