Listen Up: A Call For Images About Music

Listening to music while making art is a common practice in the studio. All that silence of solitude needs breaking up with melody and rhythm. It keeps us company, gets us singing and dancing, influences our moods and creeps into our art. It must affect us all - some of us subtly and others more overtly. Does it get into your art? That's the question I'm posing in this call for images about music or musicians.

Detail from Blues for Etta, 2012 (click to enlarge)

Until recently, I can't recall making a piece so directly about a musician myself, but Etta is often in the studio with me and has become part of the rhythm of my art making. I felt like I just had to do something when I heard that she was about to leave this world. I may have been influenced by my brother, himself a musician, who has recently taken up painting. He's making a series of portraits of jazz musicians, each in a different monochromatic hue. I like that idea because it combines his lifelong devotion to jazz with his new passion of painting.

My friend Joanne Mattera, curator of several successful online shows, including today's Dots Show, suggested this curatorial theme to me. I would probably have just gone for a color, but that's been done many times over, and this more intriguing topic may bring some interesting results and give us more clues about what really goes on in others' studios.

So here's the deal, email me an image 72 dpi, no more than 10"x10", of one of your artworks that is about music or a musician or that was influenced strongly by music. Title your image with your last name and the name of the work. In your email, make MUSIC the subject and give details about date, size and materials. Also tell me something about how you were inspired to make the piece. Note that your work doesn't have to be a portrait of someone or contain a figure. In fact, the more abstract the better.
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A RECAP OF INFO REQUIRED FOR SUBMISSION TO ONLINE SHOW

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: February 18th at midnight.

MY EMAIL:  nancynatale@gmail.com

SUBJECT LINE OF EMAIL:  MUSIC


IMAGE SIZE: 72 dpi, maximum 10" x 10", minimum 4" x 4"

TITLE OF IMAGE: Last name_artwork title


INFO ABOUT IMAGE: Full title, year, materials, size

OTHER INFO: Your name, city, website, what the work is about

I am planning to publish the show post by the end of February, if not before.

Further to the above post, here's an art review from the NY Times of a show at P.S.1 by Henry Taylor, whose work is described as "The Visual Equivalent of the Blues, in Warm Shades." Can your work be described as a musical genre?