Category: Classical music

This artwork carries on the freer use of color and design that originated with the last two works, the Art Deco inspired Vogue and the brightly colored Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca.  What makes this Serenade different is that I moved the music to the center of the stems. That technique first appeared in the artwork Liechtensteiner Polka. In the polka project having the music centered in the middle of the stems made sense because of the accordion bellows referenced in the shape of the stems.  In this artwork I centered the music for the reason that I wanted to break another sheet music rule of aligning the music along the edges of the stems.  This change had no affect on the flow of the artwork, the foundation of this art style.

This Serenade then follows the design of Rondo Alla Turca  by using a small spacer to connect the music to the stems so that the music is at different levels based on the changing heights of the stems.  This is also a change from earlier artworks where I kept the stems separated from the music or their connection diminished as much as possible. For this Serenade allowing the music to flow not only up and down across the horizontal, but also up and down the depth of the artwork, makes this representation of Mozart’s Serenade closer to the visual representation of the sounds of the music.

By moving the music away from the edges of the stems I did create an interesting possibility.  This artwork could be viewed as having the look of different flavored lollipops. To take this further it is easy to see the music in the Liechtensteiner Polka artwork as ice cream cones. Yes, I have come a long ways with even further to go.  Until the next big idea comes along, it looks for now, that the treat look is in vogue.

Scott Von Holzen

This first image of this popular Mozart musical piece does not show how complicated this project has become.  The original idea for this serenade was to create another mini type artwork. That would mean a simpler time-saving project to produce an easy to reproduce artwork. That did not happen. This work started on June 25th, and from that day on I this project has challenged my decision-making process. Every step forward has led to a step back to fix issues. The worse example of my obvious poor planning came over two weeks  into this project.

The original design of the artwork was to have a 4 by 6 canvas on the left side and the larger 6 by 8 inch canvas on the right side. After several attempts to glue down the first few notes, I realized that I had forgotten about the music box that was too big to hide behind the 4 by 6 canvas.  Although,  I had created and painted all the needed pieces of the music, I also forgot to make a note to hold the push button.  My concerned about my timeline with this artwork,  probably caused me to push ahead to quickly.  Reality hit when I realized I had no option to put the music box near the music note I needed to change for a push button.  That lead to the my only time-saving option, which was to remove my music progress, so I could then flip the artwork around to use the 6 by 8 canvas to hide the music box.

This artwork represents the first four bars of this famous Mozart music:

With this mini artwork I can see that I am under the influence of the earlier artwork, also a Mozart piece, Rondo Alla Turca.  In past mini artworks my notes would be all one color and the stems all a gray, but with this project it is all about color diversity.  With all my other mini artworks I  restricted my pallet to save time knowing that even small original artworks can take a week and more to complete.  With this Mozart,  my quickly involving style, and its influence, made it difficult to save decision-making and construction time. I should have realized that would happen once I lengthen this artwork.  To accommodate more of the music I pushed this artwork beyond the two foot limit that works best for a mini artwork.  That resulted in a  serenade that has evolved into a major mini artwork that is no longer a cost and time-saving mini artwork.  Time, that may be an underlying issue.  This art style is evolving quickly, which requires me to solve new issues with each artwork.  Maybe, this would not be an issue if I was in my twenties, but it certainly is as I near seventy.  So much music to paint. So much Time to live.

Scott Von Holzen