This is the final, final image of The Sound Silence made up of two canvas sixty inches in length. My color theme is Urban Gritty with dominant shades of blue-gray, and dull colored greens for the music, which is an interesting choice. When I was in New York City this last fall visiting my good friend Tom, there was not a lot of green in the streets. That is probably why I took one of my snapshots that day.
The real final image is the second version of the first final image which you can view below. This came about, when I realized while writing this entry, that I had forgotten one last piece of the music. That missing piece appears in the second final image as a small wooden ledger line across three of my pieces of music. With that add-on I applied more of the street colors that caught my eye as contrast to the drab tones of the buildings. That finishing touch then allowed me to consider another change.
Throughout the later stages of this artwork I developed this feeling that the coloring was not quite there. All of my attempts had only small affects or I washed them away. My thinking settled on that the coloring was okay, so leave it. What caught my attention, after painting the add-on ledger line, where those light violet colored musical stems. The good color choice well with the background, but after looking at my images of New York that day, light violet seemed out-of-place, a little too packaged for me. I decided to repaint all the stems with a color that better fit my urban color style. That made all the difference, artwork done, for sure.
My take on this painting is that the basic theme of the colors works exceptionally well for my interruption of this music. The length of the artwork is a little long, but I wanted to use the same size notes as my earlier work, Under Pressure, so that is what worked.
I can see that I am now firmly locked into using cut-out wood pieces for the music. Now, just where I can take this is what has my curiosity. I do have a small change in an earlier opinion: the background does not have to disappear, or even be greatly diminished. I can see in this artwork that the background is playing an important part in the mood of this work, and that effect cannot be underestimated.
What that means, is that I will be looking for new, creative ways to bring to life the colors, and shapes applied to the canvases. The background for these artworks, as I see, are going to make up a large part of my artworks for some time.
Scott Von Holzen
aRT iN mUSIC 