I work fast because musicians move fast, and if I slow down to be careful I lose what I came for. This one is a harbour bar, late afternoon, the singer with her eyes closed and the water behind her the same blue as the note she is holding.
The knife scraped cobalt straight across her throat because that is where the sound lives when you are really singing. No blend, no easing it in. The stroke had to be as committed as she was.
The jacket is crimson because red sits next to blue without apologizing
Fauve colour is not about realism. It is about what the eye remembers after the moment passes. I saw her jacket as burgundy, maybe darker, but I painted it cadmium red deep because that is what it felt like against the harbour light.
When Valentina called this “a striking embodiment of the Café Fauve style,” she meant I am doing the same thing over and over. She is right. I am. I chase this same blue-and-crimson collision in every harbour piece because I have not yet painted it the way it actually looks in my memory, and I will keep going until I do.
The red does not apologize for being next to the blue. That is the point.
The band behind her is four strokes because motion does not hold still
I left the musicians as shapes. Alizarin for the bass, violet for the keys, ochre where the drummer catches the light. If I had detailed them, the eye would stop there and the piece would become about a band in a bar instead of about one voice holding a room.
The linen weave shows through in the water. I like that. It reminds you this is fabric and paint, not a photograph pretending to be a window.
This is for people who want the sound, not the room
If you need the architecture to make sense or the perspective to be correct, this will irritate you. The harbour tilts, the band does not sit in actual space, and the blue is not a blue that water ever literally was.
But if you have ever closed your eyes while someone was singing and felt the note as a physical thing in the room, you will recognize this.
Gallery-wrapped canvas, in 3 sizes — 14×11, 20×16, 24×18 in. Ships free within the continental US.
