The joy of listening to Jimi Hendrix

The story behind The Joy of Listening to Jimi Hendrix

Very few people have had as strong an impact on me as Jimi Hendrix. At around the age of ten, I first heard the incredible music of The Jimi Hendrix Experience. The sheer sense of wild and unrestrained joy that the musical trio produced has had a profound effect on me. The guitar playing by Hendrix was so masterful, dynamic and creative it made me realize that to be celebrated as an artist you have to –

1. Master the skill set for the chosen art form.
2. Understand the history of that art form.
3. Take all the talent and passion you possess and create new art by building on what has gone before.

Jimi Hendrix played a guitar style that was influenced by rhythm and blues. He added an incredible array of new techniques to create something so vastly different from anything that had gone before but still had a solid underlying bluesy feel to it.

I wanted to pay homage to Jimi – the sound of his guitar playing is so wild, joyful, and dynamic it is best represented in an abstract expressionist painting. So I started with a black background and then proceeded to add a wild, unrestrained array of bright, colorful shapes, lines, splats, and marks – whose forms are just like the intricate and beautiful music Jimi created -interwoven, complex, dynamic and masterful.