My sister, Denielle Bassels, is a jazz musician in Toronto. I started going to her gigs to bring attention to her work, and stayed for something else. She and her bandmates were communicating in a language I could not understand, and they were somewhere I could not get to, even if we were in the same room listening to the same music. I wanted to know what it takes to go there.
I began to paint in plastisol, a printing press ink. The medium I painted in needed to challenge the status quo of its use in the way I was challenging the status quo of fighting. Painting a unique, one-of-a-kind composition in a medium built for duplicating cheap reproductions spoke to the impossibility of duplicating the person in front of me. The surface was two-hundred-pound 44 by 33 inch paper, hardened with inkjet printer ink and a spray bottle.
Paintings using printer ink and plastisol ink
Left to right from first row: A feeling of Play, More Than Her Song, Blue String, Orange Hears Blue, Hands like Strings, Hands of an Angel, Dynamically Still in Red, and Red is Primary to Yellow's Solo while Blue Leaves.
The making mirrored the subject. What breaks a beginner early is also what prepares them to survive the refinement that comes later. I painted each musician without black. The shade of fighting I had been working through was hidden in them, passive and innate, and leaving the black out was how to say so. Something in each of them spoke to a place the audience could hear but not reach, and that the musician could not reach without the audience. The refinement is the walk between those two, and their music is the footsteps.
Left to right from first row: The Exit, The Hit, Beautiful Strays, Untitled 05 Toronto, Untitled 06 Toronto, and August Sun's Blues Through Pink.
A few pencils
Left to right from first row: Something More, See Through Me, Untitled 02 Toronto Jazz Series, Untitled 03 Toronto Jazz Series, Untitled 04 Toronto Jazz Series, and Untitled 07, Toronto Jazz Series.
Nothing here is about music. It is about the price of getting good at something, paid by the person getting good, in front of an audience that only hears the result.
Exhibited
Through Glass: Shattering Intransigent Perceptions, group exhibition with Artists in Momentum. Artscape Soundbox, Toronto, 2 to 3 September 2018, and Mississauga Central Library, 2 November to 30 December 2018.
Eighteen paintings from the series at 120 Diner, Toronto, 6 December 2018 to 28 February 2019, as the first instalment of Shapes of Toronto Sound in Colour, a project presented by Denielle Bassels pairing Toronto musicians with visual artists.