Starry Night

Pete loved music, so I painted him to it. While I worked I played the music he loved and let it move my hand, laying his love of sound down into the brushstrokes themselves. The swirl in the sky is not weather. It is the music, made visible.

This one was commissioned, and it belongs to the Pop Art series I have been exploring since 2009, where I take an image the whole world already knows and rebuild it around a person it was never meant to hold. The night is Van Gogh's, the most famous sky in the history of paint. The hand is mine. His village became a city on the water, his cypress became the burning shape on the left, his blues became teal and gold.

The sky turns the way a song does, the same few notes coming back around. Stand close and you are standing inside the sound he loved. That was the whole idea.

Original. Acrylic on canvas. Commissioned, and now with its collector.