Connections: Stories From Vinyl Art Owners

First seen in this post last April, here's how Michael has his painting displayed. Given to him by his girlfriend, Melanie, the piece looks cool in their music corner. Melanie says he likes looking at it while he plays his guitar. This is my first post of what I hope is many showing how owners of my work have their pieces displayed.

This one has three stories associated with it. I love how they interrelate.

1) Melanie, who lives in Florida, was referred to me by her friend Dee. My wife and I had met Dee and her husband, Tanner, on line at the House of Blues in New Orleans for the Kings of Leon. Obviously big music fans too, as they'd driven from Florida to New Orleans, Dee ended up buying one of my paintings of Miles Davis as a surprise birthday gift for Tanner. Dee's feedback is the 3rd one on my testimonial page.

2) Michael's feedback about the Flaming Lips is on that page too. Melanie gave it to him as an anniversary present. It was supposed to have been a surprise birthday gift, but I got it to her so fast, she couldn't stand it and gave it to him a month early. I say to give me a month to turnaround a commission, but I really try to get it done before that, especially for surprise gifts.

3) Melanie was named after Melanie Safka. She has several LPs of the folk singer that she hopes to have me paint on someday. It was around the same time I was painting the Flaming Lips that I also painted Melanie for a guy trying to get her inducted into the Hall of Fame. I love it when my art connects with people so passionate about their music that they take a public stand on something related.

That is really why I do this, the individual stories of love for music and humanity. I've received a couple other photos of my work in place either on shelves leaning against a wall or hung. I'll be posting about them soon, and I hope to get more responses from other owners!

Peace.

The Observer And The Observed

Part of the Uncertainty Principle in Physics (yes, I hear "blah, blah, blah..." after the word Physics now too, even after 6 years of UCLA science courses, but stay with me) says that whenever a subject observes an object, the act of observing changes the object, making the observation always slightly different than the reality a moment before. In a way, listening to vinyl is like that: each time an album is played, the record is worn a bit. I know it's very slight, but sometimes I hesitate to play albums because of it. That's one reason why I'm so thrilled to be able to archive my records with the iRecord.

Some of my records were recorded from "reference discs", not master recordings, so they already bear the artifacts of repeated play. That was the case with the third album I recorded, "Strawberry Fields Forever" by The Beatles, another fan club release. It's got some great rare stuff on it, but the recording noise and extremely short track breaks led to both sides being recorded as one long track each. Oh well, so I got to try out Audacity, a free audio file editting program, to split the tracks. It worked like it was supposed to, even though it took awhile to load in the original uncut file. So, I think I can use the iRecord succesfully for all my records! I could've tried increasing the silence sensitivity setting to split the tracks, but I didn't want to have to play the whole record again. There already was a small skip from when I bought it. So, woohoo!

Oh, yeah, art...

I painted Stevie Ray Vaughan for Wild About Music in addition to the Dylan in my previous post. Today I'm going to frame, box and send those. Next I'm painting The Flaming Lips. The record is a dark, clear, red vinyl. This is the first time I'm using colored and clear vinyl. I'll see how it looks. I might end up spraying the backside with black to make the portraits show up more if the album cover is too distracting behind it. Or I could just create a backing out of black construction paper... I'll show ya both ways before deciding.

Peace.

A Month And A Day

Tada! No glare streaks! Just a little bit at the edge. For $100, it works pretty dang well. I can mess with the positioning of the lights too, maybe to minimize even that fuzzy spot. For this one I only used one light on the left side. There's a second light too, both are slick with built in tripods. The backdrop in the box is a nice blue too, so the color balance didn't require any adjusting. I do still need to kick up the brightness and contrast a touch, as it came out a little dark, but the above picture has no adjustments other than sizing and cropping. I can also get the album basically vertical because the backdrop fabric continues underneath and becomes the bottom of the box too, and the little tripod positions the camera so I don't have to fix the proportions either. I used to have to widen the top and increase the height to get it square. It's really neat though, kind of bounces the light all around inside to diffuse it. Anyway, I'm excited.

So, a month and a day after the end of my contest, I'm ready to ship it to the winner! Pretty cool day too: sold three at a local gallery, got a commission on a referral, got offered free records including apparently a Beatles, and got an email from a 9th grader saying I had inspired part of her art project and that she was going to write an essay about me! Me! I've also been accepted to contribute work to the Florida Music Festival Rock Walk. The best thing is my brain is allowing me to focus today. My wife's too, which makes me feel the most positive of anything. I hope it lasts.

Peace. Be well.

GIFTED - Jerry Garcia 04/02/08