This artwork on Arches paper is sold unframed.

"Blue Soul," inspired by the title of the Charles Tolliver track, acrylic paint, oil stick, colored pencils, spray paint, pigment on Arches paper.

Charles Tolliver's "Blue Soul" is the opening track of his album Connect (2020).

It has been described as a cool bop gem imbued with the spirit of the Blue Note golden age.

The rough/restrained contrast. The track contrasts Tolliver's raspy playing with the smoother, more muted trumpet and alto saxophone of Jesse Davis. My painting expresses this movement in paint: the grainy, striated, almost abrasive texture of the dark areas (the visual "growl") against the washed, almost immaterial surface of the light areas (the "soft-focus" playing of the alto saxophone). Blue is never a single color but a spectrum of textures, just as the blues is never a single nuance of timbre.

Even a slow blues remains rhythmic, structured by a regular pattern, a recurring chorus, a grid that structures the improvisation. The division of the canvas into four zones, followed by the superimposed and offset black square, plays the same role: a rigorous architecture (the measure, the square) that the pictorial material constantly overflows, scratches, and derails, like a soloist pushing against the tempo without ever leaving it.

The patina of analog sound. Connect was recorded the old-fashioned way, on tape, in London—a choice that gives the record a grain, a warmth, almost a physical texture. I really love it when that sound resonates in my studio. The white scratches, the rust chips, and the splashes of paint evoke this background noise, this analog grain.

I invite you to listen to the canvas as you would listen to a blues: a grid that you respect in order to make it resonate more fully, a rough material that carries the memory of the gesture, and a blue that is never unequivocal.