Since I retired from my career in the music business I have always been interested in the creative aspects, the emerging composers, songwriters, performers, and the technical, legal and monetary changes that have taken place and put them alongside the relevant developments in visual art – the second of my great passions. The relationship between art and music is why this website exists.
We have now passed through the main awards season in the arts, entertainment and creative industries; the BAFTAS, the Grammys, the Oscars have come and gone and the BRITS too. The last two months have been fairly tumultuous in many ways and the various news events have affected us all now. My interest in films, drama art and music compelled me to closely follow the Oscars and the BRIT awards. They have influenced my thoughts about living a full life and not wasting a moment. The two significant characters involved here were Rene Zellweger’s Oscar winning performance in “Judy” where she played Judy Garland in the last year of her roller coaster life and Billie Eilish who won the BRIT award for best International Female artist of the year. I’m still dithering how to paint the former’ s portrayal of Judy Garland which the actor investigated herself prior to filming, and have just about completed my portrait of Billie Eilish after considerable research of her short life to date and her complex, highly creative personality, which seems to fluctuate into many different forms.
Billie Eilish has written virtually all her songs with her brother Finneas, many at home in their bedroom studios, which have a soft, muffled and very mellow electro pop feel as can be heard at the start of her performance of the latest James Bond theme song “No time to die” at the Brits.
The portrait of her with her brother who accompanies Billie in the Brit performance above, has been completed on a discarded drumhead as an experiment and is shown below. It attempts to show the bright and darker side of her character and life experience to reflect the enormous scale of her undoubted talent both as a writer and performer.
As I am working on my new portraits, I have become very conscious in the last couple of months of the worldwide outbreak of corona virus which has now been designated as a pandemic and described as the worst of its kind in a generation. Drastic measures are being taken everywhere as I write to mitigate the disease for which no vaccine is currently available. At the same time two elderly members of our family, and a close friend from my career in music who was our company lawyer and also helped me with personal matters, have sadly died within 10 days of each other.
These developments have brought home to us that our lives are transient and that all of us should make the most of the opportunities we have to make a positive contribution in our allotted time on earth. One such opportunity is in my paintings which I try to make as bright and cheerful as I can, yet sometimes touch on more serious issues that concern me. Spanish flu killed around 50 million people in 1918/19 after millions were slaughtered in the first world war and many wars, atrocities, famines and horrific inhumanities and other conflicts have marred our history since. This painting was my last effort referencing Goya to show that nothing has changed in over 250 years:-
I’m going to finish on a much brighter note and quote a social media post just received from a good friend sharing a beautiful picture with the words ” be patient in a storm and focus on the sunrise after,” the kind of sentiment I painted in this picture of mine which is very relevant to the area which is in quarantine at the moment:-
