OK out there, here is the final image of  a great musical standard of the 20th century More Than You Know.  Listening to the Beau Brummels – They’ll Make You Cry.  I believe we use to play that song in the band, a long time ago.   On to Janet Jackson – Nasty,  which also feels good.  The personal preference is to be a nasty boy, but time and common sense has changed all of that. Billy Joel – A Matter Of Trust.

Some words about the words to this artwork, which are Luv you I do I do.  They are this artist interpretation  of the musical phrase, “Loving you the way that I do There’s nothing I can do about it.” The decision to paint a musical piece depends on these major things: How much does the music effect me.  For example can it be played over and over again, throughout the three or four weeks it will take to finish the work, and still sound fresh and meaningful?  Is there a musical phrase part of this music that has great interest and great opportunities to experiment with?  If there is a phrase that might work, and it contains words, can those words be twisted to  then become an expression of this artist.  And last, will the music fit on the available canvases.?  Actually, the first and biggest challenge is to go through the list of must paint music, and then convince all over again just why this music should be painted.  Some times it takes days, and no, no matter how practical it might seem, it is impossible to switch this artist mindset.  In other words, if  the current painting is More, there is no room for any other thoughts concerning the next work, which is now to be Heart.

More is an impressive effort that breaks new ground.  Above you are seeing on the top left the evolution of a musical beam.  On the whole right side you are seeing a a new take on a musical slur. Why should that make a difference?  Both of the examples above, show the slow but consistent effort to not paint boring things.  Certainly,  a curved line is a slur, and a rectangular box is a beam, but this art would have abandon a long time ago if that was all there is.  

Bruce Springsteen – Broke The Mold.  This artist understands all art evolves with repetition, but there is that moment that can separate the wall decoration painter from the born-to-lose artist.  This moment happens any number of times throughout an artwork.  Thanks, to the artwork, that demands to be different, and thanks to this artist is still lucky enough to feel what the work is saying, there is hope that the future will be full of of  swishes to swashes yet to come.

More Than You Know – Erroll Garner – Barbra Streisand – Dave Brubeck – Frank Sinatra – Judy Garland – Thelonious Monk – Dinah Washington – Billie Holiday – Ella Fitzgerald, and this artist’s very very favorite Sara Vaughan.

The third style point  used in this work, that has been mention, are the little abstractions that are the shafts used in five different locations.  At first they where thought of accomplishing something special, but soon those feelings faded away from that when they appeared to be lost in this work.  It was only adding the light green line along their edges did they seem then to pop back.

Platinum Weird – Will You Be Around.

It is the music that maintains this blog and the art.  It is hard to pull away from every night. It means that much.

Mozart – Piano Concerto No.22 III: Rondo.  From here next up is a 3 panel work  from the music of Don Henley entitled The Heart of the Matter.  The words chosen for this music are fitting and sum up the meaning of the music.  Those words are “forgiveness.”  You see if you can figure it out.

Something To Believe In – Poison.

And again Sarah Vaughan – More Than you know that is the finish to this blog post.

Scott Von Holzen

More Than You Know 24inches by 6 feet.

More is moving along without any long pauses.  A point to be made, is that the stem over the left musical object comes directly from the beams from L’estro Armonico:

After finishing the Vivaldi work, the idea was to repeat the abstract look of the beams, when working on Baby Love; instead they looked sully and out of place for the music.  That lead to search for other ideas, ending up with the surprising choice of the Hans Hofmann style beams. Although, the beams in Baby Love  worked quite well they lacked movement. They looked pretty, and organized, but just do not add to the flow of the work. And then there is this other problem with abstracted beams. Music has organization and working with abstracted beams only worked well when they where limited to shapes resembling the fairly natural musical look of narrow rectangles.  Yes, I understand up to this point in all of the history of artist’s painting music, that the excepted style is abstraction; but this art is going a different way, and replicating sheet music has never been acceptable.

Listening to Threshold – Little For Me  & then Gina Sicilia  singing Rest Of My Days.

So, with More it because apparent some other method of painting the beams was needed and finding that Kandinsky artwork, made that happen. Now, the beams in More are not only eye catching, like in Baby Love, but they have the added look of increasing the flow of the canvas.

That moves this art away from the abstracted beams. Since the method of using abstraction in this art, has evolved from a number of other previous attempts, it was thought that this could be tried on the lone stems.  The thought was by creating  little vertical abstractions, this would add interest, and variety to this canvas.  The issue became apparent, stepping back and looking at the entire work:  that the two different shaft designs interrupted the flow. The  advantage of consistent stems is apparent in the simple straight forward look and design of those green shafts in L’Estro.

Listening to Dinah Washington – More Than You Know &  to Jaco Pastorius – Wiggle Waggle (never heard of him)

This next image, created after pausing this blog entry, is the solution to improve the flow of this work.  A thin bright green line along the side of the stems was all that was needed to reconnect this image. Listening to Tina Turner – Better Be Good To Me & James Brown – Sex Machine

Now, happy with the progress of this work, it is time to figure out what can be done with the circles. Since More Than You Know, is a fairly soft music, they will probably be painted with that thought in mind.  Except…..It never ends the way the thinking starts.

Listening to Queen – We Are The Champions and finishing this blog with It’s A Man’s Man’s World by Seal

Scott Von Holzen

More than you know is taking a small inspiration from  Composition 8 by Vasily Kandinsky. Listening to Sarah Vaughan – More Than You Know.  This is a small progress note.  The beams (the objects above the circles) are  interesting in design and coloring.  Using combinations of different jars of magenta, yellow, orange, and some reds, mixed for different shades, the idea is to finish them in a style that is own my this artist.

The image color is fairly accurate, accept the white areas along the edges that have a blue cast that obviously should not be there. Therefore the whole image is titled somewhat to the blue side. It is important to the viewer, although everyone’s view is different, that it is know that this artist is trying to present his paintings  accurately, considering these are simple snapshots.  This image is taken with a Canon 7D camera, ISO 100, with a single Canon 580EXII attached flash.  There are white bounce boards along the bottom of the image to help the lighting.  The Canon flash is titled straight up to bounce of the white diffused ceiling title. That is that technical update.

Listening to Sarah Vaughan – More Than You Know.  The Kandinsky beams are interesting and a color challenge.  Using combinations of different jars of magenta, yellow, orange, and some reds, mixed for different shades, this artist’s desire is to finish the beams with a look that is more his own.

Del Shannon -Runaway ’67
Book of Love – Boy
Freddie King – You’ve Got To Love Her With A Feeling

Another consideration is that this music, generally, has been sung more by women. Because of Sarah Vaughan’s version of this music the color choices, will for certain, lean more to the feminine side of the color chart.  The beams, even in this early stage, are reflecting that preference. More Than You Know is not  a moody piece, nor bouncy, so the use of colors to move this work from right to left will be (at this moment), softer, and easy on the eyes.

Wildfire – Michael Martin Murphey.  This is kind of a long, long time favorite, maybe because of the piano.

John Mayer – Gravity
Fall Out Boy – Tiffany Blews

Scott Von Holzen
(all the music listed in these posts are in this artist’s favorite music playlist, which at this moment totals 1285 songs)

I Call your Name has gone in a different direction from image3.  Image3 was posted three days ago.   But since then it has been a struggle, a frustration, a disappointment, a concern, a triumphant,  and the awareness well understood,  that this journey will absorb a lot time, sometimes with  little to show. The time spent was with the problem with what to do with the notation, boring, been there, done that.

With Call we where back to oblong notation because the thought, from the previous work, a Chopin’s Valse that it was time to abandon the circle note.  The reasoning for that came about because circle notes  just float, and do not appear to be moving. That appearance of motion has always been important. You can see that emphases grow over the years, with the sharply raising of the angle of the notes done to create more movement.  A constant problem although, was the need for precise drawing and balancing, of the look of these notes over the entire canvas, required considerable time and effort. This was fine, at first, because the notation was considered the most important part of these artwork. This changed over time as a better balance in value caused an emphasis change to create better, and stronger backgrounds.   The quality of the backgrounds improved to where they can stand on there own, with or without the notation  Over dozens of these canvas the same drawing techniques where being used for the notation.  This has resulted in the same basic appearance of the notes from work to work: oblong with traditional style shading.

Then when the circle worked in Naive Melody with the eighth notes, it was thought that the circle could also worked for the notation.  After painting circle notation in Winter, and  No Sunshine, it became obvious that the notation appeared to be floating on the canvas  without the look of movement. In the last Chopin Valse work this became the issue.  The only thing that helped Valse was the extensive range of the notes, and some different tones used on the notes.  Shading the circle notes did not work like it did with the oblong note. The final thought with Valse was that this would be the end of the circle note.  With Call Your Name, a twist to that idea was tried.

On Call the notes where first put down as circles.  Then inside the circle it was attempted to draw in the the oblong notes.  This seemed a good idea because drawing the circle provided precise top and bottom locations.  The notes appear more rounded, then oblong, top and bottom, while the sides where drawn inside and the outside of the circle was then removed.  Some of the fourteen notes started to look good, so it then was felt it was time to shift the attention to the notation stems to see what could be done with them.

The note stems development has been stagnant over the last many works.   Imagine hanging  just above this computer desk is an example of the frustration in finding a unique way to portray a straight vertical line.  Basically, it has been that way, since the beginning of this art. The note stem is a vertical line, and its representation in this music has been important to help connect the notation and to pull the edges of the canvas into the picture. Then a thought occurred out of nothing:  the long rectangle line could be widened, like what was done in Naive, but instead of painting in  one smaller rectangle inside the larger one, two lines would be drawn, with different colors and lengths.  It then soon because obvious, that some of these inside rectangles, could be drawn just a little differently, and they could then easily come to represent piano keys.  That last revelation closed the deal.  These artworks are about music, and to just draw objects without any reference to music, seems at times too decorative: pretty color shapes adding up to being nothing more then filler.

Finishing the stems for the fourteen notes, and standing back,  those oblong notes now appeared not to work. They seemed out of the flow and appeared, style wise, less original.  They just did not seem to fit with the other looks going on this work, and it became obvious that they where going to require a lot more work to just to make them all look similar to each other.  Maybe, it had to do with the large amount of time spent on each of these canvas to draw and shaped the oblong notes, that had finally reached its limit. But, the circle, as a representative of the notes,  had a big issue: they have a float look but not a movement look.

The problem was how to use the simpler to draw, and certainly a huge time saver circle note, bit give give them a sense of motion. There was no compromise to be made. Either that circle had to move or it was go back to the oblong shape.  Out came the art books as the search began.  The Van Gogh technique of  small square dashes of mixed colors, executed at a angle, was the best that could be thought off as of yesterday night.  An earlier in that evening, an attempt at drawing  oblong notes inside the circle notes was tried, but that looked dumb. They were washed away and the angled brush strokes was all that was left to show from that nights work.

This morning the search for inspiration continued, all art build on the previous.  Nothing else came out of the Van Gogh books, but those short mixed brush strokes.  Nothing jumped out no matter how many pages where flipped though, or how many Georgia O’Keeffe interesting abstract works where viewed.  Then  grabbing  the first book of the New American Abstraction series, there it was on page 288, a circle painting by Alexander Liberman,  called Sun II.  It is a red circle painting with two smaller circles drawn inside.  The one circle was a  small solid but more importantly,  the other larger circle was a  line in yellow.  That was it, the circle as a line. The  idea was to draw the notation as a  large solid colored circle, and inside that draw a smaller circle as a line shape, and place it randomly about the outer circle. The sporadic placement of this inside circle appears to throw the outer circle out of place, and ah.. aha….motion is created.   Once again the door opened the way forward for this work and more to come.  And once again there is incentive for the the artist live on to fight through another day.

Scott Von Holzen