Rick Janson Art Studio

One of the most moving live performances I’ve experienced was by a duo for whom their identity remains a mystery to me. He played a stand-up bass, using a looping machine to build up the sound for each song. She sang with the confidence of someone with extensive classical training. I found it the kind of emotional experience that only the arts can achieve.

I had come across the pair in 2019 at a free festival in a Brussels park opposite the Royal Palace. I looked for some indication of who they were (such as a posted sign with a line-up for the festival), assuming that the worst case scenario would be I could look it up later, knowing the date and location of the performance.

No such luck.

Years later I started thinking about the relationship between music and painting. I had previously written about the family that tried to figure out what one of my abstract paintings represented as their toddler clearly demonstrated an understanding that it was about form, texture and colour. I wouldn’t recommend that you let your toddler rub their fingers across anyone’s painting, but I appreciated the nod to the work.

I often talk about how painting can be like music — it doesn’t have to be about something. When people listen to an instrumental piece, it make evoke feelings or remind them of something, but it is essentially abstract. They may enjoy the melody by itself, or the combination of melody and rhythm or even the way the arrangement works. Yet nobody comes away from a Beethoven symphony and says, yeah, but what did that mean?

I recall seeing a video posted on-line of Jeff Tweedy (Wilco) doing a cover of a Black Eyed Peas song. Emphasizing the lyrical content, it made the song look ridiculous. For much of pop music, its not about the content of the words but about all the factors that come together to make a song enjoyable, ridiculous lyrics or not.

That can also apply to representational work. While some people may be absorbed with the representation, often the real effort is about how the paint sits on the canvas. After a period of doing abstract art, it changed how I painted when I returned to more representational content. I didn’t want my paintings to look like a photograph. I wanted them to be about the paint.

Artists have painted musicians throughout history. I thought about the duo I saw on stage in Brussels and decided to render it from the photographs I had taken. The light and smoke machines made for a very abstract visual experience, a rare experience for a band that was not a headliner (don’t get me going on the insecurity of headline acts who deny the tools at hand to enhance the performance of the opening act).

This is not my normal jam, but I am trying out new genres as part of my return to full-time art making. But I still wish I knew who these two performers were.

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