Invitation art for Meals of Marin Renaissance fundraiser event
The Blue Herons, among a few abstract pieces, will be hanging at the Point Reyes Visitor Center for the next two months! Stop by and see these original pieces in this beautiful location!
For directions, please click here.
This is the final for the poem, “The Finish Line” by Jerry Patchen, a lovely marriage between words and images. The latter were done to support , frame, and embellish the former, strictly seen by me in a “supporting role”. Calligraphy and illustration go together so well, going back at least 500 years in those great big illuminated bibles that one sees occasionally at art museums.
The art has a repeating, circular theme to go along with the sentiments of the words, the never-ending pattern written about. And note the large “I” that leads off the piece: it’s more or less a microcosm of the whole, as well as a fine way to begin it. In making this, I took the calligrapher’s (Jane Brenner) own lettering, enlarged it and traced it before illustrating it with background silhouettes.
Illustrating a poem is fun, challenging, and rewarding, as it brings the poem to life, presenting it to its fullest. The artist needs to put the ego no the back burner, and serve the words, and I think this was done to good affect on “The Finish Line”.
Hearts are available for Valentine’s Day, with special inscriptions!
There are several completed hand-painted hearts available now, or you can custom-order one for your loved one!
Watch my YouTube video of how these lovely hearts are created!
The illuminated manuscript is an art form that saw it’s peak around 1650 ( a very good year, incidentally), so why am I working on a piece of art that is, in essence, an example of this art form, and one I’m so happy to be working on? The basic answer is this: I think the combination of words and images is so viable, as to be timeless.
In this case, the words, which have been writeen by a fine calligrapher named Jane Brenner, are those of a wonderful poem by Jerry Patchen, a lawyer who lives in the Houston area. His words for “The Finish Line” were easy to find images for, and so the art is done with a light watercolor of a long distance runner in the center, over which the calligraphy was done, and surrounded by a border that is both decorative and narrative, sequential in the gradual day-to-night colors, the illustrations of Sisyphus, and Hercules and the Hydra, as is the repeated motif of a silhouetted runner.
A more effective presentation of Jerry’s poem , I couldn’t imagine, and so he shall enter this as both a poem and an art piece at an exhibit in Houston. While some may see this as an outmoded art form, I see it as a great way to frame a poem, paragraph, or wedding contract, and greatly enjoy the narrative/decorative border art that showcases the words.
Music and painting going together like… Uh… You name the simile, it will fit fine.
When I draw and paint, I’m just about always listening to music, often with quieter classical guitar in the early morning hours, followed by mainstream jazz in the late morning to early afternoon, and then cranking up the volume for electric blues, which is jolting just when I’m starting to tire.
Yesterday was an all day Boswell Sisters fest, and if you are unfamiliar with the Boswell Sisters, do yourself a favor and listen to them a bit. They were from New Orleans, and made their best music between 1931 and ’35.
Being a fan of harmony singing, I love their amazingly tight and synchronized close vocal work, and even more their highly inventive arrangements of well-known (even then!) songs. They would change the tempo mid-stream, add verses that were nearly always superior to the existing number, and do it all with great enthusiasm , skill, and jazz feeling at a time when the stiff singing was still in vogur..in short, they were really great, and no one has come close since.
They were backed by the best musicians of the day, and the rhythms and textures provided by Eddie Lang (g) and Joe Venuti on violin are not unlike the textures I try to put into a painting; adding the unexpected when the mood strikes me. And those harmony vocals are similar to me of complementary colors, and subtle shadings of one color. So, the music and the watercolor art all go together nicely.
I did a piece entitled , “Record Label Jam (session)” some years back. It was consciously working off of some great Sidney Bechet recordings from the late 30s, and early 40s. They were well recorded and the timbres of the different instruments in contrapuntal lead work are easy to distinguish (even if Bechet towers over all of them with his searing soprano and inimitable vibrato). I tried to emulate this music in “Record Label Jam” with the 7 musicians pictured all leaning and listening to each other. The background of the piece is comprised of watercolor and sepia ink renderings of , what else, record labels from the 78 era, many of which were very well designed.
I first realized that art and music were “it” for me back in 1969, when I was 17, and it remains so to this day. It’s what I resonate to; as natural to me as breathing.