"Hot can be cool, and cool can be hot, and each can be both. But hot or cool, man, jazz is jazz." — Louis Armstrong
This piece was influenced by topography and by jazz music. While working on it, I started to notice how the rhythms and tones of the landscape connected with the rhythms and tones in the music. The process became about synthesizing those two things — how they overlap and feed each other.
I laid down color, then built it back up, piling paint scraps along the outer edges of the canvas and pressing shapes into those raised areas. In some areas, I used a palette knife over stencils to leave textured ridges, and in others, I used texture tools to shape the paint into peaks as I scraped through it. The surface developed naturally, guided by both the feel of the terrain and the movement of the music.