The Jazz scene in Toronto grew as an interest that began as a way to bring attention to it and my sister, and what quickly became a metaphor of the very medium I was looking for.
I began to paint in plastisol, a printing press ink. I felt the medium I was painting in needed to challenge the status quo of its use in the way I was challenging the status quo of fighting. The idea that I was painting a unique, one-of-a-kind composition with a medium used for duplicating cheaper reproductions spoke to the impossibility of duplicating the individual I painted. I used two-hundred-pound 44”x33” paper as the medium surface that required a hardening technique I implemented with inkjet printer ink and a spray bottle.
Paintings using printer ink and plastisol ink
This is a process that reflected the composition and the adversity of elementary learning that prepares the fragile beginner to survive their future refinement. I painted each musician without black, suggesting that the shade of fighting I initially explored through was hidden, was something passively innate to each of them. Something about each musician spoke to a place in themselves the audience could hear but not go to, and yet without the audience the musician could not find. It was the ‘path’ to the summit in themselves revealed through the audience, the refinement of which was the footsteps of their music.
A few pencils
