Posted by on Aug 14, 2016

As I write this I am listening to Hermeto Pascoal’s “Slaves Mass.”

Earlier this afternoon I was reading David Byrne’s book “How Music Works.”

I had just finished a piece for a fundraiser when I realized that how I am painting now owes a lot to music. By adding brushstrokes onto brushstrokes in an assigned space, about 2/3 up the picture plane, my process is much like over dubbing in the recording studio. There is also a relation to free jazz where musicians play different melodic or harmonic lines together riffing off each other or expanding on another’s exploration; the effect can be jangling and confusing.

I don’t listen to music when I work finding that it interferes with my concentration. One commenter on Facebook said that one of my paintings had the affect of many voices speaking all at once. Of course this can lend a chaotic sense to my paintings. Depending on the width of the brushstrokes, sometime only using similar width brushes, different voices can be seen. The compositions can be clotted or open.

Recently I changed the naming convention for my work; picking at random characters from Shakespeare’s plays.