Nothing like a challenge to get my creativity flowing. I was approached by The Calgary Fiddlers to provide some charity artwork in their yearly fundraiser. Now I love helping out charities whenever I can…but I have one catch….it has to be something specific I can do, or something I can participate in like painting on site.
Calgary Fiddlers asked me if I would paint a damaged violin for them, this was a new type of charity artwork and I was excited. I heartily agreed, and then they mentioned that they had a Cello. Well, if I can paint a horse, then I certainly can paint a Cello! Just imagine how excited I was to have an opportunity to do something fun like this! It wasn’t long before this beautiful (yet beat up) Cello arrived at my door.
I must say that it sat for a while. I struggled through my creative process thinking of what I wanted to portray in this piece. The only thing I worked on first was filling some of the holes and breaks on the body of this instrument. I can see that the journey this particular Cello was on went through the Calgary Board of Education. So I am guessing that it had seen many hands.
It is hard to look at something like a Cello, and try to imagine even touching the beauty that it already is. And I worried about this quite a bit. I wanted to show some of the beautiful wood in this piece, and I wanted to include a bit on music in it (of course what else do you do with something musical), but how do I do that without it being predictable and obvious.
Then as the deadline was looming ahead of me I knew I finally needed to roll up my sleeves and get started. Now putting that first stroke on a nice clean canvas can be a challenge for any painter — but has never been a problem for me…..this was completely different.
At first when I started adding colour and working toward my vision I got frustrated because I hated what was happening. Feeling worried that I’d messed up this beautiful piece I pushed on. Adding more layers, more lines, and of course more dots until it started to come to life. I thought about my horse and wanted to depict the possible life this Cello had before it came to me. It wasn’t long before things just started falling into place and the design of the Cello was complete.
Using the swirls of colour, and white lines I thought of different paths that the instrument might have taken. The composition on the back starts to look almost map-like. I was able to reveal bits of the original wood while giving the Cello a whole new feel. ‘Final Journey’ was sold before the fundraiser to a client that just had to have it!
