Listening to Miles or Kind of Blue

‘Listening to Miles’    6. 12. 2013       64″ x 46″    Atelier Interactive Acrylic on canvas

‘Listening to Miles’    Day #5

Ouch !  I need a professional photographer, John Janca,  to record my paintings. I have lots of parallax distortion, here.  The color and focus definitely could be better. Cadmium red and cadmium orange are used here. My hands are taking a beating from using the computer too much. Leaving the computer at home, I’m heading to Oregon to paint with a group of artists for a week. By settling myself in the middle of the woods I plan to take chances, paint what is unfamiliar to me, try new colors, new shapes, new whatever – just throw away the familiar for awhile and see what happens. If you keep doing the same thing, you are going to stay in the same place. Right? We will see if I can do it.

This painting came very fast – 5 days.  I was listening to Miles Davis in the studio. My idea was to paint about the sound of his  music.

Day #1 – What a fun day this was!  The painting stayed very loose, strong and lots of color.

Day #2 – At some time the painting takes over and I let the painting take me in a new direction. Fantasy animal-like shapes started to appear, a couple of  figures popped up, a strange shape with blue lines punctuated the painting.

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Day 3# – Detail showing brush strokes.  I changed the Stripe to green.

Day #4  Today I took out the stripes. They were distracting. My eye went to them first and that wasn’t what I wanted to emphasize. Adding black on the lower left hand corner seemed to be right. I strengthened my shapes. Now I see a four legged animal in there.

Definitely some guy is tapping his foot over there on the left.  I was listening to a lot of his music when I painted this. Interesting, there are no cool blues  in this painting.

A few months ago I did go see a small exhibit of artwork by Miles Davis in Napa Valley. His trumpet was displayed. So was one of his jackets and a wonderfully soft leather bag. It was a thrill to be so close to part of him. He was an extraordinary jazz musician.