Category: contemporary art

S_V_H Wings of Victory image5

Published on by Scott Von Holzen

 

wingsOfVictory_5b

This is an image of Wings of Victory with all the musical features added.  There is still plenty of work to do with the color, and to clean up the entire artwork.  What you are seeing is close to the finished product.

This has been a challenging work made difficult because of a limited pallet. In most of my works I paint the entire range of colors available.  I use a lot of colors to add interest, create tension with neighboring colors, to increase the drama you see in the work, and to give me a pleasing appearance.  I would get bored and lose interest painting a black and gray canvas.  That would be to boring,  even though I know at times painting can be tedious work. Still, it should never be dull.

Ever since the Japan Back paintings, and the client requesting a more “spontaneous” style I have questioned my painting techniques.  They may have a point. Right now this is my thinking: I have seen plenty of musical artworks that are spontaneous abstractions of swirling colors, and shapes, that I feel I do not need to paint.  Then there are plenty of examples in today’s modern art of solid shapes and strong lines, along with bright colors, most of which I consider sterile and just as boring as musical abstractions.

I believe music has a lot of structure, but I am not painting sheet music so from the beginnings of this art I have loosened up that structure that is continuing today. Maybe not as much as my Japan clients wanted, but I am aware that musicians deviate from that discipline of the notes having specific lengths of sound, such as Charlie Parker, but the music is still harmonic and present. Where does that place this art?  Right now I believe it is somewhere between musical abstraction and painted sheet music.  For now that is a good place.  But, I do feel my thinking about the structure of music is beginning to loosen up. I give you a very small example.

If I am using only one canvas size, I would first have to figure out the proper size of my musical notes to make sure they all would fit in a limited space.  For example if 80mm notes fit than I would define the up and down movement of my notes in terms of that same note size, 80mm.  That changed recently with the Japan works.  They were unusual artworks, for years now I have move away from rectangular works to long horizontal artworks, that better match the music. But I could not do that with the Japan works because of my predefined dimensions.  What I did was instead of using  50mm movements up and down the artwork to match the size of the my notes, I choose 60mm to better enhance the sense of movement across the  artwork, and to fill a lot of extra space.

Today, with Wings of Victory, I have taken this difference between the music and the flow direction further.  With this artwork my notes are just over 40mm, but for the up and down spread I used 60mm. By increasing that difference in height between the music I have added extra impact to  this fairly straight music, making it more interesting.

This style of portraying music is still young and I certainly know that it’s growth will continue for years to come.  I am anxious to see more results of this evolution in musical acrylics.

 

Scott Von Holzen

S_V_H Wings of Victory image4

Published on by Scott Von Holzen

 

wingsOfVictory_4

Wings of Victory the School Fight song for Northwest Missouri State University.  After spending so much time with shades green (all the shades of green that I could mix in two weeks worth of effort )  I had no clear idea what I was going to do with the stems.  Generally, with most steps in an artwork, I never have any clear ideas.  The ideas clear themselves, and then I say, “yes, that is what I will do.”

Because I had, for some unknown reason, abandon white for my musical notes, white then became the necessary theme for the stems for these notes.  At first I tried all white stems, with streaks of green, similar to Image 3 of Take Five.  The green dabs looked awful. There was this long pause, along with long stares.  I knew as I looked at this green-shady artwork that I needed a fresh take.  This artwork, and me, where both in a slump. Then a thought occurred.

Towards the end of my two weeks of, lets mix another dozen shades of green tonight, like we did last night, phase I found a green that kinda look like the green of the Schools colors, but that was more fun to look at.  I noted that green, and place a sample in one of my many sample jars that were already full of forgotten lumps of green-shady greens. Eureka, I  then washed the white off of the stem.  I painted that stem that special green. More green was not what I needed, but I knew that this time I was going to doom this green.  Instead of squeegeeing  a little white to add contrast, I globbed it on my special spreading tool, and let it flow across the stem, that I had covered with my special shade of green.  And it worked. I let a little of that green peek through, just enough to loosen up the look of the now all white stems. When done I looked at this two toned artwork, and for the first time I felt good about it.  The work was coming into its own: the painting began to breath on its own. This artwork is starting to let go of me.

Scott Von Holzen

 

S_V_H Wings of Victory image3

Published on by Scott Von Holzen

wingsOfVictory_3

This artwork Wings of Victory for Northwest Missouri State University has a  height of 21 inches by 65 and 1/4 in length. I was going to do the flow of the music in White, the other school color, but I liked how the shades of green  worked well with the background, so I stayed with it. Tonight, I will be putting in the musical stems, and they will be white, with some green trim.  I will have to see how it works. The hope is for the white stems to breathe some life and drama into this artwork that fits the pounding of the music of a marching band.

If you miss my last post here is the music for Wings of Victory, so you know what I trying to capture in this painting.

 

 

Scott Von Holzen