I wanted a blue dominant tone for this composition in homage to the great jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery.

A rigorous structure inhabited by improvisation:

"West Coast Blues" is a composition that employs a variety of harmonic foundations and shifting tonal centers, and is historically considered a seminal recording for modern jazz guitar. The piece is based on an unconventional blues: a solid formal framework, but one from which Montgomery constantly deviates.

In my painting, the interlocking blue rectangles represent the form, the structure of the 12-bar blues, while the vertical red lines represent the improvised melody, the guitar phrases that traverse and transcend this framework without breaking it.

The gestural band at the bottom, its splashes, its white streaks on the blue, is the only place where the painter's hand is physically revealed. It is the body within the work, as Montgomery played with his bare thumb, without a pick.

The palette uses only one color, presented in about ten shades, from midnight blue to electric blue. This multifaceted monochrome reflects Montgomery's approach to the blues: it's always the same territory, but he traverses it differently with each chorus. West Coast Blues is both close to classic blues and profoundly singular, a variation on a universal form. Blue here is not a color, it's a tone, a mood, a mode.

The work functions like an abstract score of West Coast Blues. Wes Montgomery constructed order from the chaos of the blues; this painting does the opposite, and with the same gesture, it lets the chaos surface just below, reminding us that all geometric rigor ultimately rests on something as human and alive as a drip of paint.

Montgomery's music heard in my studio inspired these shades of blue.

I made a similar composition on paper ("West Coast Blues"; 50X50 cm; 2024).