Tag: Music Box

S_V_H Images of What Have I done….

Published on by Scott Von Holzen
The official video of What Have I Done……their 1987 hit. The colors and Dusty Springfield’s hair style are so the eighties.

This 2022 video below gave me a much better idea of the colors the Pet Shop boys like to use.

What Have I Done…… live performance in Parque.

This is how I came about choosing this Pet Shop Boys song as my next project. It was on a walk that this Pet Shop Boys song caught my ear. I think for this project it was the lyrics especially, the repeating of “How I’m gon’na get through,” that are the “sampled” lyrics displayed on the artwork. In that moment those words were summarizing my directional concern for this art.
To confirm my pick, I check online for the sheet music at MusicNotes and purchase it. I could cobble together the sheet music with the help of the music’s free preview sheet music, but still there would be a lot of guessing and certainly respect for the accuracy of music is important to me. Even more important, is the value of my time. For a few bucks I own my cover music guide I can trust. After completing the project, I then purchase a cover music license. I am required a minimum of 25 music boxes. That is fine, even though there is only one music box, and I do not know if I will ever need a license, or any of the 40 plus licenses I have already purchased. It is not my music. I am doing what I feel is respectful and adequate for now.

What have I done….. first image
Here is a pre-release rough draft of this music box’s eventual cover music

The Pet Shop Boys videos have a lot of pink tones, and other mostly pastel colors in their performances. I choose a combination of colors from the videos that differed from previous recent works and went to work.

__________________________________________

I forgot to post, so now I have added an update.

“What Have I done,” near finished

This is the finished image I need only to go over its details to make sure I have completed what I needed to and then sign and date this work. I will post a video and the updated cover music on this next blog entry.

______________________________

I have made a small but important change in my thinking and direction: I need to document my depiction of sheet music beams.

The image below is a typical of sheet music. The “beam” which is the wide bar that connects, in this example, two notes from sheet music.

Above is the typical example of the look of my beams I have used for many years.

Now above, and below, are my its-about-time whatever beams, including a double.

Earlier this year, I started experimenting with different beam shapes out of creative boredom. In this work, I finally abandoned the idea that all beams should look similar. The only rule in my art is to capture the flow of the music visually. While this beam change seems simple, my respect for the music and the importance of sheet music has made it difficult, and slow going, to fully let go of tradition. Below, I summarize that change.

The image above is an example of my mentor Christy Skuban wooden artworks, in which most pieces of every artwork she ever created were built from scrap wood other artists have given her.
Previously, I would discard my wood scraps once the container was full. My mindset has now changed from hoarding scraps to actively incorporating them into my artwork. Thank you Christy.

____________________________

Finally, I need to document a short story about a meeting I had concerning the future of the art group EmptyWallsArt, that I help form.

After a surprising number of months I had an eventual coffee meeting with Jeff to discuss the future of our art group, EmptyWallsArt. Before our membership meeting I wanted to put together some kind of joint understanding. We needed to come up with something about the future of the group after the sudden passing of our co-founder, Christy Skuban, in January 2024.

Christy was the heart of our group. She managed a gallery, displaying and selling all the members art. Even though my works didn’t sell and she eventually asked me removed them, I still believed in her. Christy was a relentless marketer, always seeking exposure for the group. Now, with her gone, Jeff had no other choice but to become the group’s reluctant leader. But his loyalty, like the rest of the group, was to Christy and not so much to EmptyWallsArt. That is the reluctant part.  Tom Petty’s lyrics best summarize the group’s current thinking, “Their A&R man said, ‘I don’t hear a single,” without her.

During my coffee meeting with Jeff, I suggested that to keep EWA going, we might need to replace members and consider admitting 2D artists—a significant shift from our original focus on 3D art. This idea arose from the limited local 3D wall art talent, which became clear to Christy and me at our last group show when we struggled to meet the requirement of adding three local 3D artists. Jeff seemed both surprised and somewhat reassured by the suggestion.

My surprise came when Jeff expressed excitement about a cruise line that buys and rotates art on their ships. I responded, “People on a cruise aren’t there for the art.” All that did was reinforce our differing perspectives on art. Thus began the beginning of the end of a conversation that soon dwindled off to what’s left to say. And, as usual with Jeff and our meetings, he had somewhere else to be. He got up, turned his attention to someone at the next table, and I got up and left.

On September 10th, the group will meet to decide EWA’s future. Jeff and I agree, this could be the end, with several members possibly quitting. Full membership participation or not, with the remaining members, will determine the future of EWA. Even if EmptyWallsArt ends as a membership, I am going to maintain the domain name, just in case. Once again, I regret my difficult position, and my hopes for this group’s future being summed up in Tom Petty’s lyrics: “Into the great wide open, under those skies of blue, out in the great wide open, a rebel without a clue.”

Scott Von Holzen

(This is this artist’s 775 Post, which first posted in January 2010)

S_V_H The Logical Song 1st image

Published on by Scott Von Holzen

This first image of The Logical Song shows a mix of colors I saw watching a live performance.

Live performance of The Logical Song

I do not remember this song, released in 1979, or even the group Supertramp. Checking my Liked Songs playlist on Spotify (now at 2,353) I see that over the years I added four Supertramp songs: Bloody Well Right, Goodbye Stranger, Give A Little Bit and Take the Long Way Home. I added The Logical Song four days ago. In my search for my next project what probably caught my ear was this music’s chorus heard on a random Spotify playlist on the computer.

The verses for this music are mostly 8th notes. A big change occurs in the chorus. The music flow switches, adding half and whole notes that slow the music. Right away, my thinking was that those longer notes would work nice with string instruments, adding depth, volume change, and drama all under a minute. Since I am continuing with these small size projects (abhorring the thought of doing any major work) finding music that I can do a shorten cover, that is an easy listen, has nice lyrics, and is not music from the sixties, makes for a good choice for a mini project.

Scott Von Holzen

S_V_H Dance Monkey 2nd image

Published on by Scott Von Holzen
Dance Monkey
The backside of Dance showing the replacement 100w amplifier I found to replace my 20w that is back-ordered.

My choice to become a visual artist began after looking back at 500 years of western painting, and finding a different way to represent it. If that had not happened my other options would have been a return to photography (Ansel Adams) that I had pursued for decades, fall back on my passion for poetry (Robert Frost & E. E. Cummings, or writing (Ernest Hemingway) that drove me in my twenties. Instead, I am making this new path by creating distinctive portraits of songs. These mini music boxes are now the latest step forward in this journey. Once, resolving production issues, their smaller size, and therefore shorter production time, will make them less of a risk in time spent and in artist project fatigue. These mini works should also double my yearly production, making more current art available to show in more exhibits and galleries.

Hearing the words left, right, in the video below, when testing a new stereo system install, is a relief knowing that all the soldering and wired connections work. This first test came about because the company where I have bought the 20watt amplifiers, that I have used for years in all my major artworks, where out-of-stock. That lead me to look for a backup replacement amplifier.

First tests of a new optional amplifier. The Adafruit sound board comes with a default sound file used to tests the speakers.

I had a major crossroad back in 1993. That was the year the tourist motel up in Northern Wisconsin that my wife and I managed, sold. We went from “Scott and Barb from the Lake Aire motel” to “scott and barb,” living in a neighborhood. It was in this transition period that I earned a two-year degree and went to work at a paper company as an IT support person. This is where I meet the maintenance crew that I supported.

Eric Clapton and Cream

The maintenance workers lived with the idea that if you wanted something done, the cheapest and the best quality would be if you do it yourself. During my time at the motel I outsourced all the needed improvements. Now working as an IT guy, with its modest income, I reluctantly realized if I wanted home improvements, I would have to do the work myself. That choice started a learning process helped by the advice and guidance of my friendly maintenance crew. What I achieved then now years later has helped me build better art. That was a major crossroads that I luckily chose.

Recently, I stumbled onto another crossroad, which showed up in a note I wrote that I later shared with my therapist. The scribbled message read “…everything would make sense up to this point if this art sold.” That got me to thinking: how do I justify my new large expensive studio, all these many years of time, and incalculable amounts of monies spent, that to this day eighteen years later, there is still no definable market or interest? Of course the answer is I can’t. But the note’s stark question, offers an equally stark answer. Even my therapist thought selling art to whomever wanted to buy was the way to go solve (my words) artist’s frustration exhaustion. I had made the point earlier that my wish was to sell to collectors.

I need sales, became my thinking at a time that I began producing smaller, cheaper, more home owner wall friendly works. The original purpose of these mini works was to help slow down my tight storage issues. But now I see their size, quality, and lower pricing as a as a fresh approach, ignoring all the previous promotional attempts. Another understated advantage for smaller sized works is that they will be visually a better fit with the other members of our artist collective, EmptyWallsArt.

Although I do not have numbers from talking, I feel most of my fellow member artists sell fairly consistently. Still, they joined the collective, looking for more opportunities to sell their art. Overtime I realized that their practical focus was to make art that sells. When I first help create EmtpyWallsArt, my naïve reasoning was it was all about creating original art, that would then catch the eyes of high end galleries, that would then sell the art. But that may not be what they were thinking. Speaking for myself, I see the membership’s current obvious desire is to create more art that sells. That got me thinking. Maybe I should stop (it was not working anyway) trying to convince the group to go crazy creative. Instead, I wondered if I should follow them instead, knowing what I wrote that sales make sense out of all this art thing.

The collective comprises members who need to sell art to make a living. Others appear to want to sell to supplement their income. Until I read my note to the therapist, I felt I did not fit in either group. What helped me to choose were my current projects of smaller, less expensive, and more viewing public orientated artworks. Changing my thinking to that of the supplemental sales group meant I was taking the note seriously. But soon there surfaced the omnipresent reminder of who I and this art were all about. Once again, I found myself at another crossroads. Should my directional choice be Dire Straits or follow the advice of Oliva Rodrigo?

Dire Straits – Money for Nothing
Olivia Rodgrigo – Bad Idea Right?

Oh well “Fu#k it. It’s fine. Stay the course.”

Scott Von Holzen