Tag: contemporary art

S_V_H Purple Rain image3

Published on by Scott Von Holzen

purpleRain_3

An Artist’s music can live forever, but they don’t, and if  touched by them, maybe this tweet says it best:
Thinking about how we mourn artists we’ve never met. We don’t cry because we knew them, we cry because they helped us know ourselves.     — Juliette (@ElusiveJ)

Here is a beautiful tribute 2 Prince Rogers Nelson, by a co-worker and extreme fan,  Shawn S.

I was and not I am even more focused on doing my best to make Purple Rain the painting a fine example of contemporary musical art. For What it’s Worth.

With this image you are seeing the music flow in place. Working with wood, and then attaching it to the canvas is a learn as you go experiment.  For example,  after gluing the music on to this canvas,  I had to figure out how to carefully remove dried glued wood from fragile canvas.

In this work two of my I beams dropped out-of-place, and needed to be removed, and re-positioned. It was not until I applied heat from a hair dryer to these misguided sticks,  that the damage to the painting dropped to almost nothing.  I was lucky that the move, and the repairs worked, and the painting is back to original condition. All of these mistakes are well deserved, and paid in full by a self-taught artist that is pushing Musical painting to extremes.

I am aware that when I start each of these artworks, that when finished they all fall a little short, have minor flaws, or don’t quite meet my expectations, and yet that works for me.  With each of these painting I start out with high expectations, and then slowly the artwork takes on almost human characteristics. May be a little of me moves into them.  Anyway, when completed they become,  a lot more real then perfect. Much more alive than, lets say, any Digital artwork. It is that human touch,  that ends up in them, that makes each of these artworks a part of me, or what connects us.  Each is an example that tells this artist that the best is yet to come.

 

Scott Von Holzen

 

 

S_V_H Purple Rain image2

Published on by Scott Von Holzen

purpleRain_2This is a short update.  This second image of Purple Rain, for now,  shows the background finished.  I call this artwork  Purple Rain, but so far violet has been the dominate color.  The plan is to save the many shades of purple for the music, and other add-nos. In this second image I  have striped out some of the violet with colors I found in Prince’s clothing in a small number of his video interviews, appearances, and performances.

While looking for a mix of colors that make up Prince’s image I saw,  and learned more than I usually do, about the artist and his music. This was intimidating, for Prince certainly is a well-respected song writer and musician.  In comparison I am just a guy painting music artworks, only starting to build a career.  That kind of thinking I had to put aside for it was too restrictive.  This painting is not a tribute to Prince.  Obviously Prince is a fabulous  artist, but if I am to succeed at being a painter of musical artworks,  Purple Rain, as an artwork, has to stand alone, as my cover of a great pop rock song.

Scott Von Holzen

S_V_H Purple Rain image1

Published on by Scott Von Holzen

purpleRain_1This is the artwork Purple Rain based on a single larger canvas instead of my recent trend of using small combinations of canvases.   After my first years of only using single canvases I began to combine them  to paint larger artworks. These larger size paintings peaked with the Vivaldi Four Season series where I joined single large canvasses together to produce works twelve feet, and more,  in length, by three feet in height.  The largest, and last of this series, Summer Presto, stretched 20 feet. After finishing the Vivaldi paintings I decided I needed a break from big.

The change to producing smaller artworks, came about out of exhaustion, and the practical consideration that smaller paintings are easier to hang for more buyers which could help to increase this art’s market.  They are also less expensive to make, cheaper to ship, and take a lot less time to complete.  Since March of last year the size of my artworks have ranged from around three feet to five feet in length. The results of these small works, so far, have been disappointing, with little interest generated all through 2015 to the present.

When I began to put together my ideas for Purple Rain I looked into my storeroom,  and all I saw where stacks of large unused canvases. This got me wondering how I was going to use them up. With that thought on my mind I decided to reject the idea of using a number of small canvases for this artwork.  My new direction for Purple Rain, that you see in this first image, is to go bigger and simpler, with the choice of only one two foot by four-foot canvas.

That brings me to this general feeling that my backgrounds have become too predictable. With a new thought in mind for Purple Rain,  I decided to mark the music on the canvas before applying the first layer of paint.  This then allowed me to place the stripping so that it moves along with the music. For the background colors besides shades of purple,  I checked out Prince’s fashion look in his music videos, and  images. You can see in this first image of Purple Rain where I used colors from Prince’s performance at the 2007 Super Bowl:

Awful official NFL video.

 

I am painting this music because of a request by a possible buyer,  and because I am a fan of Prince’s original Funky sound.   Purple Rain stands out as an outstanding pop rock song, and a choice that might appeal to many Prince fans, as it certainly does for me.

Here is an early, and a rare live version of Prince singing Purple Rain.

Scott Von Holzen