My Beatles Collection also includes a painting based on the Beatles’ song A Day in the Life, which was the final cut on their Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. This
was rated the greatest ever Beatles song in a special collector's edition issue
by The Beatles: 100 Greatest Songs, a list that was compiled to coincide with the 40th anniversary
of the Fab Four's final studio album, Let It Be.
A Day in the Life was the final track on the Beatles' legendary Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which marked the Beatles transition from pop icons to one of the major musical artists of the 20th Century. And that's why an anonymous
American collector in 2010 purchased John Lennon's handwritten two-sided lyric sheet for the
song (which includes corrections and alternate crossed-out lines) at Sotheby's auction
house in New York for $1.2 million! (Rolling Stone Assistant Editor Andy Greene considers the music sheet to be the crown jewel of the Beatles collection.)
This song has many, many parallels to how I create art. Just like pop music
is a reflection of, or commentary on, popular culture, pop art transports
images from popular culture into fine art. John Lennon wrote the first half of
A Day in the Life. He based it on two stories he had read in the Daily Mail
newspaper.
The first was about Guinness heir Tara Browne, who died when he
smashed his Lotus into a parked van. The other was an early 1967 article in the
UK Daily Express that reported how a road surveyor had counted 4000 holes in
the roads of Blackburn and commented that the volume of material needed to fill
them in was enough to fill the Albert Hall.
As an
Expressionist, I don’t just paint pop images, I strive to show my intellectual, emotional and spiritual
reaction to the images I paint. So did John. Tara Browne did not
blow his mind out in his Lotus. “I didn’t copy the accident,” said John of the
lyric. “But it was in my mind as I was writing that verse.”
In most cases, my paintings depict one image or a single theme. But there are occasions when I challenge myself to include and reconcile
multiple, even conflicting images. Often, these are the most satisfying works that I create.
If you think about it, we often combine
seemingly contradictory tastes such as spicy and sour or sweet and bitter to
create dynamic flavor profiles. John and Paul did exactly the same thing in A
Day in the Life, which synthesizes two separate songs into a cohesive whole. The
section Paul wrote that starts “Woke up, got out of bed” was intended for
another song.
When you look at opposite or random objects, your mind naturally looks for
some way to unify them so that they make sense. It’s a phenomenon that creates some
of the most satisfying surprises in the creative process.
Once John and Paul
decided to combine two songs that didn’t initially have much to do with each
other, they had to find a way to combine them in a way that made sense. And
Paul did this by bringing in a 41-piece orchestra to bridge the gap between the
two songs. Today, everyone agrees that was sheer genius. I won’t claim that any
of the transitions I’ve used in my paintings are “sheer genius,” but I do
believe they are inspired by a higher power. And that’s the key in creating
anything – tapping into and giving yourself over to that higher power we all
have.
The last parallel I want to draw to A Day in the Life is that when creating
a painting, artists often build their compositions in layers. A Day in the Life
was recorded in three sessions. First, the Beatles recorded the basic track.
Then they recorded the orchestra. Finally, they dubbed in the last note.
In
painting, artists often start with a drawing, which they pencil in and then
darken with a sharpie. After that, they may do successive washes, building up
layers and levels of translucent and opaque pigment. This can be composed
solely of oil or acrylic paint, or it can include other materials from
newspaper and magazine print and photographs to resins, bees wax and archival
ink.
Sometimes this process takes a matter of days. At other times, it may last
for months or even years.
You can see my homage to A Day in the Life at my retrospective this January
at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center. The opening night reception takes
place from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. on Friday, January 6, 2017 at the same time as
Art Walk. Make plans to see me there. It will be an event you’ll never forget.
One of the paintings that displays my passion for fashion
is a triptych of Mina Miller Edison that I painted in 2014 as the centerpiece of the Fort Myers Founding
Females portrait show. That was an exhibition that was designed to introduce Southwest
Florida residents and visitors to some of
Fort Myers’ most prominent early female leaders, civic activists, philanthropists and
entrepreneurs. Notice how I gave Mina a vibrant, free-flowing gown that reflects her youth, self-confidence and penchant for making a statement.
I called the painting Mina’s Touch to underscore that she placed her imprint on the town we know and love
today. Triptychs are paintings that consist of three interconnected panels. Each of the panels in Mina’s Touch measure 24 x 72 inches. I painted each panel on unstretched canvas so that I could roll them up and take them on the plane when I flew back to Southwest Florida.
The painting was something of a departure for
me. While it features the loose and lively brushstrokes that I prefer, I
didn't use either drips and splatters. This made the final result
more of an Impressionist and less of an Expressionist painting. The shift in genre was a byproduct of spending several weeks painting in Claude Monet’s gardens in Giverny, France
and attending a workshop in California where I studied portraiture theory
and technique.
