Category: Classic Rock

My current trend  is to let the music  define the size and shape of the background.  That is not the case with Like a Rock. The rigid shape of the background of this work, like the recent Chopin commission, means that I had to adjust my music to fit the backgrounds. I don’t like doing that, but commission works have exceptions.

The wood features of the music evolved from my standard Classical music shapes. This simple style is flexible in the spacing, and in dimensions, allowing everything to fit in the  background.
Up next I will be doing some stripping to add interest and movement to the artwork.  After that I will be finishing up with the words.

Scott Von Holzen

For now the background is finished for this second Like a Rock project, and to my surprised it turned out better than I expected. Even though I stock many different canvas sizes I was lucky to find two sizes that where a close match to the dimensions of the client requested Chevrolet logo.  Because silver surrounds the logo I decided I would do the same with angled aluminum.  The problem was the difficulty in finding decent lengths of aluminum that where not marred or scratched. I searched three stores to find enough aluminum for this project. That made me realized that the issues of marring and scratching using aluminum needed to be resolved.

What resulted was that I learned that rubbing compound works for cleaning, and triple and quad zero wool removes most flaws, giving the aluminum a clean-looking finish. Finally,  using a Dremel with a buffing wheel gives me an extra backup for removing the worst mares and scratch marks.

Next up I will be placing the music.  For the music I went to the local Chevrolet dealership with a color chart to narrow the range of possible blues.  On my second trip to the dealership I  compared my painted test samples to what I call the “Chevy blue”  you see in this example:

With the help of my wife it turned out that the best option, for the music,  was a slightly tinted Primary Cyan.  I know my color pallet for this artwork is extremely limited.  That means adding contrast and interest to this artwork will probably be limited to those colors already in the background, or shades and tints of the music color. That may be an interesting challenge, something only commission work offers.

Scott Von Holzen

Here is the first image of the commission work to create an artwork based on the Chevrolet, Like a Rock commercial,  that ran from 1991 to 2004.

The client wanted to include the Chevrolet logo, and as you can see I have done that. It is amazing that my experiences of using aluminum and canvas to create some pretty good Artworks, would be put to use to make a reasonable facsimile of an automobile nameplate.  Fascinating.

Scott Von Holzen