Category: artist notes

What Child is This is this years Christmas Painting, close up. This is a dinky painting 20inches by 5feet.  The size is rather boring and surprisingly it’s size pales in comparison to the Chopin piece along with the sense of challenge.  Strange,  it was thought that a smaller canvas offered the chance to experiment with more freedom.  Yet, hum, that feeling still stands, yet, hum, maybe it is like betting with quarters instead of hundred dollar bills.   It is this way with each painting: there is an idea and a path to take and  for some reason the artist attention span is short, and the path quickly turns into a trail, into trampled grasses, into finally an open field filled with a breeze and a reassuring sun.  And what does he do? He puts on his sun glasses and searches for the way out.

Scott Von Holzen

This painting is full of musical ties and slurs and they are fun to let the brush to wander about the canvas to see what works.  These lines are the widest that have been used but they seemed to not effect the strength of the notes.   The lines give life to this work and because they are spinning across the canvas a sense of movement exists.  No real movement, not like the LED light show that is on YouTube of the artist, Leo Villareal.  His work must be impressive and appears to be very modern. Can canvas art exist in this age of digital brightness?  It is wondered if this art should be built on more recent examples, instead of relying on that old dead artist Van Gogh.  Today’s art appears to offer much more opportunity of diverseness.  If you think about it Van Gogh pushed  art forward  be using brighter colors with obvious brush strokes all with an emotional edge, which today is just plain common.  Maybe this work is built on a past art that has been left behind 60 years ago.  Maybe, there is a better way yet left to be discovered. Maybe, none of this conversation matters:  real art stands the test of time, and only years gone by will be the  true judge of what is fine art and what is only the art of a moment.

Scott Von Holzen

Closeup partial image:  Progress is slow.  The focus is weak. the effort is there just not enough.  To many distractions.  Art requires a lot of concentration which is easier with youth and a challenge with age.  Aging adds complications and if you have a day job that bounces around so to does the art.   For two days, nothing seemed to fit with this canvas.  Dragging other canvases out to view, should of help but did not.  It has been emphasized a number of times in the past that each work forces decisions that reject the past and that is true with this work.  This canvas is long, 14 feet, but the notes are fairly small, about 70mms, to fit the last nine measures.  This creates an issue,  because of  their size, things were being painted with delicate moves, contrasts, and colors.   This soon was seen as a mistake, because of the length of this work, it is not going to be viewed generally, close up. So the emphasis changed to paint more visual effects that can be seen from further back.  Even when the final image is reproduced on the website  it is going to be reproduce with great closeup detail because of the Canon with its almost 4×3 format.

Tonight, the shafts of the notes finally flowed off a small pallet knife and although the beam color, yellow Ochre, may seem to earthy, that may be just a base color to build on.  Anyway, the Ochred may look out of place except for one thing, it stands out from away.

Scott Von Holzen