"Blood in My Eyes"
album cover for Ben Bradlow

Hopefully Ben will not mind the premature launching of this image. I believe that his album preview/release party is this weekend, but I wanted to put this up sooner. Any comments or feedback would be great, as a lot of this process (painting an image, putting it together on the computer, etc) was new for me. Although it looks pretty different than the last image that I posted, I really did use that idea to inform this image. In particular, that is true for the organ/meat/red object shape. I must have drawn that shape 30 times. None of them were any better or worse than the others, but I think I needed to know that I could draw it again if I needed to, that the shape wasn't created accidentally. The small circles below that shape were inspired by a trip to Locks Gallery, after seeing a show by Jennifer Bartlett, which is essentially composed entirely of tiny dots. I am liking dots right now.
I also really like how the brown background ends up looking like a smear of mud. That was totally unintentional, I didn't think much of the texture would transfer onto the computer, but in the end it came out okay. I originally thought that I would base this painting on the idea that Ben's music (and all music, really) is founded on a long line of musicians from the past. All artists grow and develop their own ideas from what they see and hear of other artists. But that ended up translating into very superficial images, the worst culminating in me trying to transpose Ben's head onto silhouettes of the Sheiks. Bad idea, bad.
But other themes seemed to come out from Ben's music which were more appropriate. While painting I thought about natural, primal emotions and how that can get channeled into music. Parts are muddy, parts are more vibrant; sometimes it gets quiet, and sometimes it yells out. I don't expect my images to symbolize any particular idea, but I hope the overall composition opens up different visual associations for each viewer.