Author: Scott Von Holzen

 What you are seeing is the second image of a painting of two measures from Dave Brubeck’s Blue Rondo á La Turk. The change in style, that shows with this work, clearly works.  These two measures of music were found to fit an artwork around six feet in length. My goal.  This size allows more options to hang Blue Rondo at a different locations at the University.  After choosing the phrase from the music to paint, I than broke that down into pieces finding the right size canvas to fit each.  Next up I  connected those pieces, at an  exact sharing point, to best represent  this musical flow.  What you have now, is a better visual physical representation of those few moments, from this exceptional Jazz piece.

The overall feel of this Jazz piece, I do like.  I cannot help but use a lot of blues and deep greens.  The vertical red bars, which I mention in the video, still bother me, and will need more paint.  I have also done some work on the left beam, seen above as a drawing, but this morning I looked at the results and quickly decided that I had to think of something else.  What happens, with many decisions, is that they just pop into my head. Most of the time the decisions are correct, but sometimes like the effort with the beam, the paint looks bad.  I am looking for a new idea.  Tonight the small goal is the painting in the beams on Blue Rondo. I may then switch over to the Vivaldi work so I can apply what I have learned.

Scott Von Holzen

This artwork is just over six feet in length, consisting of six panels. It surprised me that I can paint a piece of music in that small amount of space.  Lucky, there are a couple of parts from this amazing music that allowed me hold down the final length of this work, but still fit a phrase.

This is a jazz piece  called Blue Rondo, so the color blue is a natural choice. Since this work is only two measures long, it would have been possible to place it all on a single canvas, but that look would have lacked interest.  What has energized this artist is the method of  breaking the music apart  into smaller pieces per each canvas, and then connecting all those canvases in an orderly flow.

This artwork comes from suggestions made by my Music teacher, professor Tim Buchholtz. When finished,  hopefully, I will be presenting it too him, as a gift to the Music Department of the University of Wisconsin Marathon campus.  It is my way showing appreciation to the school and the teacher that allowed me to take the fall semester class, Music 171 Music Theory 1.

This is an update from the image you see.  I am having issues placing the music, especially, on the last canvas. This is happening  because of the style change in how I  group the music.  In the past the music flowed evenly across a work, so  if I was having spacing problems, I could make up for such issues further down the artwork.  Now, that option is more limited by the decision to place the music in groups with each group placed on a single canvas.  After resolving the spacing issues, helped by reducing the size of my notes, I found I still had one more problem. This final issue was with the last canvas.  I found that I had to shorten up the stems for the notes, so everything would fit vertically, but in doing that the beams, for these notes, dropped considerably off  of the work.   Generally, I do not mind cutting off the music, like cropping a photograph to create  an  edge that adds drama and tension to a work, but this slicing was causing too much of the music to disappear.  To solve this problem, I added an eight inch by twenty-four inch canvas on the lower edge of the existing twenty by twenty-four inch canvas. This change to the artwork will appear in the next update.

Scott Von Holzen