Scores of books have been written about this seemingly simple instrument, from technical manuals to poetry. Renaissance painters put the violin in the hands of angels and saints, while Charlie Daniels put one in the hands of Satan himself.
And of course, the violin has inspired beautiful music. Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart: All were violinists. Even as classical music has taken a back seat to amplified forms of music over the past half-century, the violin has remained a beloved element in modern music. Besides Daniels, fiddlers such as Alison Krauss and Darol Anger, as well as pop musicians such as Andrew Bird and D'arcy, have kept the violin a vital voice in today's music.
The names of the artists who participated in the project should be familiar to anyone who has engaged local art in Missoula: Patti Canaris, Monte Dolack, Mary Beth Percival, Hadley Ferguson, William Gamradt, Deb Parsons Menke, Larry Pirnie, Jonathan Qualben, Maxine Stahl, Karl Stein, Lane Timothy, Sue Toppen and Teresa Garland Warner.It has been famously said that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Insofar as that's true, writing about paintings inspired by music is a self-evidently hopeless enterprise. So we decided we would go back toward the source: to the artists themselves, and their own words about what inspired and challenged them in this first-of-its-kind fundraiser for the Missoula Symphony Association and Guild.
MAXINE STAHL
My husband and I have lived in Montana now for 14 and a half years, and we go back with the (Missoula) Symphony for most of that time. It has long been a big part of our lives. So they asked last year if I would participate in this project, and I said, "Of course."
I got the violin last fall, and my husband, Paul, was so proud of that. But then he got very, very ill. In February, he was hospitalized and I got a call from my friend Anita from the (Symphony) Guild saying, "I hate to tell you this, but the deadline for these instruments is March." I vacillated on whether I would do it or not. I knew that if I told them I can't, they would completely understand; but then the angel on the other shoulder said, "Well, you can't just not do it." Paul wanted me to do that violin; he was so proud of that. So I decided I would do it.
I had at least prepped it ahead of time, thankfully, and I knew I was going to do an American Indian design. But I hadn't worked out the color yet, and I thought, "How can I be creative in this state?" But I did, I forced myself to work on it between getting (Paul) into the right nursing homes and watching him deteriorate. Every time I came home, I forced myself to work on it. The little angel on my shoulder kept me focused.
The design came to me slowly. I started off by looking at the f-holes in the violin (the holes in the front face of the instrument), and suddenly one day I could see Kokopelli, the Indian god, and it just went from there. I have a very dear friend who is part Indian and he was most helpful. We talked about it a lot, especially about the color. Color is so emotional, and when I do a piece of work like this, it has to play a concert in my heart. I hope that comes through.
Anyway, it was good to work on this because I could get my mind off what was happening with Paul. I just poured myself into the work. Then he passed away (on May 6), and so I can honestly say it was a labor of love, because I know what it meant to him and I wanted to contribute to the symphony, which has meant so much to us over the years.
LANE TIMOTHYI did a skateboard (deck) for the Missoula Skatepark's art auction last year, and so when this idea of painting a violin was offered, I thought it sounded like an interesting challenge.
I started by stripping it down to the bare wood, and then I painted the whole thing with a pounded copper metal paint that has this effect that's like hammered metal. I wanted it to look like it was cast in bronze or something. I still didn't have any real idea of what I would paint on it. But once it started taking that aged copper feel, I started thinking I would do something sort of Medieval-looking.
So I started doing research into violinmaking. There's a violinmaking school just down the street from me - it's supposedly one of the best in America - they make these beautiful violins. So I went and watched how they did that for a while, which kind of got the process and the possible poses in mind for me.
After that, I got a model to put on some Medieval clothing and pose for me while I painted the back of the violin. To finish it, I put a wash of a patina over the top to make it look like it'd been in tobacco smoke or a cathedral with smoke over the years.
It was really fun, a long hard process, but well worth it.
TERESA GARLAND WARNERI know Cathy Capps (president of the Missoula Symphony Guild) originally from work, and she has a little bit of my artwork in their house, and so I think I might have been one of the first people she talked to more than a year ago about this project.
When Cathy first mentioned it, she said the (auction of the violins) was going to be held on Valentine's Day. So I immediately started thinking about those themes of love. Because I'm not as experienced as some of the other artists involved, I thought I needed a little time to think about whether I could come up with something. I talked with a professional artist who had worked on wood and I asked him how he would paint on this kind of surface, and he gave me some
ideas; and I came up with an idea of what to paint. So I thought, well, I can commit to this. Then they decided to delay the event until now, so the Valentine's Day part of it wasn't there anymore, but I decided to just go with what I'd decided on anyway.
I was going to paint red roses because those represented love, but since the background color of the wood was kind of orange, I had to change the color of the roses so that they contrasted better. Fortunately, I was using oil paints so it wasn't hard to change.
One of my daughters is quite good at piano and she had a piece of music by Beethoven on sheet music, so I painted some of the score to that in there. Someone pointed out that that's piano music and this is a violin, which shows my musical ignorance, but oh well.
I noticed that some of the other artists just painted on
the back of the violin. For whatever reason I thought people would look more at the front, so I tried to incorporate those different shapes - the holes and the rest - into the design. That's been one of the interesting things is to see how everybody solved those problems.
JONATHAN QUALBEN
When I was contacted about this, they offered me a violin to work on. At first I thought I might try to smear concrete on it, but then I wasn't sure what I would gain by that. So I drew up some distorted and abstracted violins, thinking I would do something just like that, but those didn't really play for me, you know?
So I invited over a woman I know named Janet; her grandfather was a very famous luthier out on Cape Cod and she played violin also, so she came to the studio with a violin. I was looking at various poses, fingering positions, bow positions. I thought I might do a piece with just the hands playing the instrument.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, she was cradling the violin and I was like, "Oh my God, that's beautiful." There she was, with her grandfather's violin - it was just this great connection of history and family and love of music.
It made me think about the fact that a violin is a hunk of wood and nothing more unless someone loves it and plays it and makes it an extension of their own expression. That connection was what inspired me, and it's what brought her face into the piece I did. I don't normally do faces, but the hands and her face conveyed this whole connection to the instrument and that's what I went with.
So then after that it was just working with the concrete to create what I wanted.
All art is really nothing more than the ability to see something that's not yet there - that's the creative part - and then the ability to express that vision - that part is the technical craft. Music is really the same in that the fantastic violinists out there, their technique is huge but if they don't have the heart or the vision of what to express, they're like that line from (1 Corinthians) - "If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal."
Preview
"Painted Violins," a gala dinner auction to benefit the Missoula Symphony Association and Guild, will be held at the Hilton Garden Inn on Friday, Sept. 26 at 6 p.m. The evening will feature 12 violins, hand-painted by renowned artists, to be auctioned off by Missoula Mayor John Engen. The painted violins are on display at LA Design, 337 E. Broadway, until the day of the event. Tickets are $75 per person and $150 per couple, with table sponsorships also available. To purchase tickets or for more information, call721-3194. For an online preview of the violins, visit http://www.missoulasymphony.org.
Reporter Joe Nickell can be reached at 523-5358 or at jnickell@missoulian.com. Photographer Linda Thompson can be reached at 523-5270 or at lthompson@missoulian.com.
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PJT wrote on Sep 25, 2008 12:10 AM: