Oil on Canvas
60X48 Inches
Staring at the blank canvas, I held in my minds eye a conjured image; a woman laughing at herself… playing a toy piano. Simultaneously strokes of surrounding energy appeared (later applied in thick textural color with widely swinging strokes of a 12 inch bakers icing application tool).When I started the sketch she got younger and the piano became an instrument of dynamic expression. In the end as in the beginning a painting is requires puissant accord of abstract and recognizable forms. The enveloping willingness of the piano lid to accept her callipered legs is design element that the emitted energies circumnavigate and use as structure. A medium for sonorant inspiration, her eyes are closed accessing an internal melody. The play of coils and strings, the 88 black & white keys allowed a painterly caprice this artist enjoyed immensely. The decision of ‘which hues to use’ was cast by the oxide yellow background. This raw pigment, a ground up chunky powder borrowed from the great alluvium store, kept in an old fashion glass pharmacy bottle on my highest dusty shelf. Once dissolved the viscous potion conveys a pleasure which is uniquely yellow but has the calming effect of an earth tone, holding down the potentially quarrelsome red and blue and completing the triad. Before long I was humming Buddy Holly, poising her hands at the top of their arc and all 10 fingers momentarily hovering over a major key. I needed enough human detail to balance the preponderance of purely abstract swatches. Taking the time to proportion fingers is a task we unconsciously want the figurative artist to undertake (a condign body part to all pianists accepting possibly Jerry Lee Lewis who did rather well with his feet). Dropping out the piano bench, was a deletion made in behalf of a mid-air performance.