Wow, 2020 is truly a year that many will remember for a very long time to come and for many a year one wants to forget. I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday and that 2021 starts in a way that brings everyone together as we truly need unity and core family values during these challenging times.
This little Christmas Tree is reflecting the long and unsure winding road we all had this year, but it does end at the top with a prospect of hope.
Peace and kindness are still words that we should reflect every day.
Wow, on September 18, 2020 marked the 50th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix’s passing. He has been called the greatest rock guitarist of all time, but music should never be a competition. There’s no scoring, there are no wins and no losses. All I know is that from a very young age whenever I heard his guitar playing, I knew even then I wanted to play guitar. His sound was otherworldly and then in the next instant sounding like it was coming from the earth itself. Just like John Coltrane a few years before, they both took their respective instruments, deconstructed them, and put them back together to create a new sound and raised the bar of musical expectations from then on.
There have been countless books written about Jimi because of his charismatic stage performances, clothing, and outlook on life; trying to live free and create music was his only sole purpose. His inspiration to me was mostly his guitar playing, timing, compositions, and lyrics. I never tried to play just like him, but he enthralled me so that it made me thirsty to play his magical notes and chords so I could experience them for myself. I bought every one of his albums and started collecting live performances and trading in the circles along with collecting Coltrane at the same time. Few know that he had his guitar with him practically at all times and played everywhere any anywhere. He even slept with his guitar! It became an extension of himself where he could exhale all he absorbed in the world around him and play it through his fingers in real-time. His Star-Spangled Banner from Woodstock is still relevant today, especially with all that is going on in the world and the disconnect in our country.
My playing has been a long journey. The idea that took the longest for me to realize and appreciate, both in my guitar playing and painting, is to trust your instincts and just let go. It is very liberating to open up those hidden channels and let them flow freely. You will be surprised at what you can do.
I wanted to create a dedication piece as a tribute to Jimi that includes all the colors of the rainbow because that’s how I describe his music. I also wanted to fashion the piece into a 12-inch album format as an abstract record cover that captures his energy. By the way, I am trying out my new acrylic gouaches for the first time with this piece. I love the dense, vibrant pigments.
I was reading various art articles this weekend and came across a couple of really interesting pieces that looked more like writing than abstract art. Apparently, they were Asemic writings. I asked myself, what the heck is Asemic writing?
According to Wikipedia, “Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing.” The word asemic means “having no specific semantic content” or, “without the smallest unit of meaning.” With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would deduce meaning from an abstract work of art.”
How cool is that! What can I come up with trying that technique? Well, the answer is the piece below. Looks like I created my own Hieroglyphic. Now if I can just decode what it says I’ll know what it means 🙂
I haven’t painted on canvas in about 5 years so, I decided it was time for a revisit. I started to use Liquitex Acrylic Inks around that time as a more modern replacement for traditional gouache, providing vibrant colors and permanence on my favorite watercolor papers. Paper still absorbs some of the paint and has painting characteristics that are different compared to canvas — I decided it was time to see how my style would work on canvas with the Acrylic Inks.
The result below is a small 8″ x 10″ canvas inspired by various Native American art. The name of the piece is “Donoma” from the Omaha tribe, meaning: Sight of the Sun.
Peter Green, one of my favorite blues guitarists, passed away on July 26th of this year. He was a great inspiration to many, including myself, and my guitar playing. He played with so much feeling with a wonderful voice that complimented his playing. As the founder of Fleetwood Mac, he took them to become one of the world’s premier blues band of their day. Also a great songwriter, not many know that he also wrote “Black Magic Woman” that Santana ended up covering and became one of their most recognizable signature songs. B.B. King once commented: “He has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.”
Never having any ego, he even tried to give away his earnings during his stint with Fleetwood Mac. After leaving the band he never really could return to his glory days and playing skills as mental illness issues plagued him for many years. He soldiered on, got better, and began to play again until his passing.
There are plenty of great recordings to be able to revisit and enjoy. None was greater than his playing with Fleetwood Mac. But knowing that no more music will be created by him is truly sad to me.
Just listen to this live Duster Bennett piece he performed and you will hear the soul and passion in his singing and playing: Jumping at Shadows
This was the music I was listening to when I created the below piece in his memory.
I was getting bored with the current selection of watch bands out there for my Apple Watch so I wanted to do design something a little more interesting for myself. I looked over some paintings of mine, picked two and took a slice out each of them (a scanned image slice). I played around with some variations and came up with this.
Here’s an interesting piece I did while on a recent trip to California. Somehow the thought of chocolate came to mind and how we try to find the balance in eating just enough to satisfy our cravings but not to get out of hand and eat too much. I haven’t used watercolor pencils in a while but seemed like a mix with the Acrylic ink and Indian ink. It’s still fairly small at 9″ x 12″ as that seems to be a comfort size for me.
Ok, after months of tweaking, undoing, rethinking and redoing, I’ve changed the look of my website. The goal was to make it more a reflection of my paintings and drawings. I know that it’s not a normal site with normal menus and navigation. What is normal anyway? I’m certainly not and now my site isn’t. I will be tweaking and adding as I add more areas and refinements but I finally wanted to get this out there.
Please explore as that’s what this site is about….exploring.
Paul Klee is one of the Masters that I’ve always admired. His work can be so different from one another but still distinctly Klee. I saw one of his pieces that triggered an idea to which this painting came about. It’s different but might be a start to a new series.
“A Blind Mathematician Searching For Prime Numbers”
I’ve always been intrigued by birds, their habits, skills and colors. I’ve recently seen an amazing BBC Nature series called Earth 2 and if you haven’t seen it and love nature it’s worth watching. After watching, I was inspired to do a piece as a tribute to the amazing ornithological world. It’s not based on any particular species or color pattern but my own species of a bird that I found in my head. Let me know what you think.
