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This painted Pat Metheny album is dedicated to Reinhard Dalchow
My first relationship was with a musician. He played guitar, still plays guitar professionally; from him, I first heard the name of Pat Metheny.
Today we are separated, but still good friends. And when I bought an iPod ten or fifteen years ago, he sent me “Goin’ Ahead.” As soon as I heard this piece, I had to play it again and immediately bought the album. For days, I listened only to “80/81”. Later, I discovered other albums, other performers. Jazz became more and more important to me. Today, it is part of my daily life. Two years ago, I visited a concert by the American jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, which inspired me to turn his music into paintings. Yet, even at the start of this project, I was haunted by the idea of visually recreating the music and styles of other performers.
The first album I painted was based on pieces by Brad Mehldau. After finishing, I did not doubt that I would now create a series of abstract paintings inspired by the music of Pat Metheny, which would again be the ize of record covers.
I started by compiling the titles that would go into this series and preparing the necessary white painting backgrounds. At the same time, I began to break down the Ibanez guitar played by Pat Metheny into formal elements, arrange them, and quote them. I also started to create the first backgrounds, the first color grounds – with the goal of expressing the music through rhythms of color.
In the next few months, I tried to paint several pieces by the Pat Metheny Group. There is a lot of the piano of Lyle Mays, the former congenial partner of Pat Metheny, speaking from the colors I selected. But I restricted myself to only using the forms of the famous guitar, of Pat Metheny himself when designing my paintings. Still, it’s the interplay, the timbres of all participating musicians, that shape my work.
For me, the Group’s joy of playing is intoxicating, their playing light, carefree, and yet thoughtful. Pat Metheny’s warm guitar is almost hypnotic, his distinctive yet harmonious playing eliciting new shades, unique tone colors from his semi-acoustic Ibanez. Moreover: Sometimes it seems as if he and his Group play themselves suggestively into infinitely wide sound spaces… into spiritual jazz.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, my partner suggested that we temporarily move to his remote meadow orchard, to his house on the edge of a forest. That’s why we left Frankfurt and traveled to find seclusion in a vast, lonely landscape. Surrounded by the silence of nature, under apple trees, I began to willfully lose myself in Metheny’s music – painting myself into its sound worlds. I often used color tones inspired by the apple tree meadow, which I repeatedly applied with a thin glaze to the painting surfaces, brightening them up a bit, as the intense light constantly created new, spontaneous realities and frequently changed colors. The results were light colors, fresh color accents, at times close to the play of light, the color light, yes, even the color spots of the meadows; his piece “Farmer’s Trust” even got a landscape.
I did not paint alone. A soft wind passed over my paintings and did its best to write itself into my layers of paint, stimulated by Pat Metheny on guitar.
The guitar spoke, murmured, purred with the wind that brushed across the paintings, nervously seeking its way over the canvas in this or that direction, whimsically developing its very own writing. The wind took possession of my artwork, sometimes drawing entire color glazes following its imagination.
There is one image that, while I particularly enjoyed painting it, also presented quite a challenge. “Naked Moon.” Based on the guitar shape, I had designed two segments, inspired by a duck in a lake I had observed while taking a walk. And when I heard “Naked Moon” that evening, it hit me that this could be the visual composition: A moon that – just a moment ago – was just a droll duck.
Even before I started to work on the Metheny paintings, it was clear that my album should begin with “Goin’ Ahead” as a thank you to the friend who inspired me to discover Metheny’s music. But then, there was this Naked Moon Duck, for which I had chosen the space next to the title “On Her Way.” However, the duck disagreed. I looked for another place, but it didn’t want that either. So, I put the duck next to the pieces before and after, but it rejected all the places I offered. In the end, it put its foot down and claimed the space I had given to “Goin’ Ahead.” So, that’s why this album starts with a duck.
Leah Rudolph, Frankfurt/Main, March 2021
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