My Musical Art Used Around The World.

In my last post, written a while back before I got seduced by the lovely summer weather,  I wrote about how my work gets used for lots of different events around the world.

The most recent one is for the 7th Festival Sinfonico Pereira 2012 in Colombia, South America.  I think this poster looks really great!  I also promised to show you this years cover for the Peter Caelen series of concerts held in the beautiful castle in the Netherlands so here it is.

The two images make up the front and back of the brochure cover. I'm not sure how to tie them back to back to show the cover as it actually is but I am sure you will get the idea.

My work was also used on a CD cover this summer and for all the promotional materials for the Artists Series concert season at the Opperman Music Hall in Tallahassee, Florida.  Very exciting!

The Musical Series have been very successful for me and although the actual people interested in musical works is smaller than the demand for landscape art, there are musicians and music lovers out there who really love the work.

I recently had a very proud father email me to say that they have a budding pianist and that they had bought a reproduction of one of my paintings "Music is the Key" to help inspire him.  They made a video, posted it on youtube and sent me a link.  You can see it here and see my keyboard painting in the background.   It was really fun to receive this.

If you know any music lovers who may be interested in my musical works please help me by passing on the link to my web site.  There are also reproductions of some pieces available on the site.

It's not the New Year but I've made a resolution to post more often.  Now that the weather is cooling off it will be easier to stay inside and work both on my art and blog.  That is the one good thing about living in a place where it gets cold in the winter.  It makes for a natural rhythm of working and playing.  Summer for play and winter for working.  I'm already getting back into stride by creating some new plates for printmaking and looking forward to proof printing them.

Musical paintings

Musical Images used for Art Licensing

©Susanne Clark - Cubist Play
Acrylic on canvas - 30 x 36 in 

Cubist Play, above, is being used for the 2012 - 2013 program cover for the Virenze Concerts which take place at the beautiful classical 14th century Castle Rijckholt, near Maastricht in the Netherlands.  This is the second year my work has been chosen as the cover art for their season program and I am excited about it.

Over the past few years I have had lots of requests from all over the world to use images of my musical paintings for a variety of uses.  Most are required to promote music events like concerts, or for CD covers but one was also used as a holiday greeting card for the Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera Company in the UK and another as the cover for a cello society cookbook.  It's great fun for me to see my work used this way and I now have quite a collection of pieces which a friend suggested I put together and publish in book form. This will be a nice way to keep it all together and there are some great ways to self publish using products like Blurb or Vistaprint.

The right to use images of work from the web is not really understood. People think they can use anything but that isn't the case and most images are under copyright as are mine.  Early on one of my pieces, Cello Babe, was incorporated into the poster above.  It won a competition to be used for an annual school musical concert in Australia and was designed by an art student at the school.  After the posters were all printed the teacher somehow found out that part of my work had been used in the poster without my permission and he, knowing about copyright, was horrified and emailed me straight away to see if it was ok to go ahead and still use them.  Of course I agreed but I was impressed that he had the courtesy to email me.

This poster is from back in 2006. Cello Babe was one of my first musical works and has been requested quite a few times as has Jazzy Cello which has been used as a cover on several CDs as well as posters.  The "Musical Series" came about as the result of a request by my son. He is a musician and had just completed recording a CD with a producer he was impressed with. He wanted to give him a gift in thanks, so he asked me to create a painting with a musical theme.  I enjoyed doing it so much that I did several more and the series was created.

In my next post I will show how Cubist Play was used on the new Virenze Concert brochure and the use of my work for the Artist Series in Tallahassee, Florida.

New Painting

This "Musical Painting" is the same design as the previous one called "Golden Notes" but it's a painting I did while I waited for the ink to dry on the experimental printed piece on board. I quite like to try doing the same thing in several different ways. This is in a high colour key, a play on words too, which is a nice change from the many red coloured paintings that I seem to have been doing lately. It's also a playful piece with more fluid brush work.

Please let me know what you like hearing about in this blog and I will try to oblige.

Small Musical Paintings and Abstracts

I have been working on some small musical paintings, 6 x 6 and 8 x 10, which is a real challenge for me. I like really big you see. Anyway it has been a good exercise to do and I now have a few pieces that I quite like. I also did some abstract works a month or so ago and I find that the way I painted those has filtered through into the latest of these small works. One is posted here.

I have been busy getting ready for our move to Toronto. We should be on our way in mid July. I have applied to three art festivals there that will be held in September. I have been accepted into one, Art at the Distillery, and I am waiting to hear about the other two. After finding out about which ones are good or not in the Atlanta area I now have to sort out the better shows in Ontario.

Exhibition Update

The next few weeks will be pretty busy for me. I have the opening of the Dogwood Show at the AAC tomorrow, April 11th 1pm, and I also have some work in a show at Rev Coffee in Smyrna. This is a fun coffee shop with an eclectic feel. They have lots of art on the wall and at night there is live music. The art opening for this is at 8pm Saturday 11th. Next comes the Alpharetta Streetfest, 18th and 19th April, and then the Wesleyan School's "Joie de Vivre"on April 30th and May 1 and 2.

I am now working on some very small musical pieces. They are 6 inches square and at that size the smallest work I have ever done. I am having fun with these though and really enjoying the challenge. Once I have a few finished I will post them here. I hope to keep the cost at under $100.00. Sunlit Sails above, is one of my newer works. After a lot af red paintings it is refreshing to do something in summer colors.

Kimono Collagraph Print is the July Draw


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This month one of my Kimono collagraph prints will go to the person whose name I draw from the email subscriber list. If you are not on the list and wish to be, sign up now with the subscriber button on this page.


I have been working on a new collagraph print with a musical theme. Because many of my paintings recently have had a musical theme I thought that it would be interesting to take that over into my printmaking. I am making four plates 8 inches by 12inches, that will, when all printed together, make a wide narrow print that is 32 by 12. In the picture you can see that I am at the beginning stages and still trying to decide what textures and shapes to add to the plate. Once I have finished adding stuff I will coat the plates with a shellac finish, ink them up and then print by running through my press. I have the option to make prints using the whole four plates or as few as I like. There is always the possibility that I may not like the way any of them print and so then I would have to discard them but hopefully that won't be the case.









The dark areas on the plate are made by putting glue where I want it and then sprinkling carorundum grit over the glue. The grit is a black sand like substance and when inked up for printing, it prints very dark. Where I paint with acrylic paint the ink will wipe off more and print lighter. Every type of paper and substance collaged onto the plate prints in a different manner so it's exciting to try new materials.

In my next post I will show you how this is progressing and also post a photograph of "Tempo in Blue" which now has it's bow in place.

New Musical Painting

"Tempo in Blue"

Some paintings come together easily, others have to be dragged into being and this is one of them. The early stages went well but then it all changed and it got darker and darker. A lot of my recent work has been very red so at least a blue painting is a nice change. I like the idea of "Tempo in Blue" but I'm not sure how happy I am with the final result. I am taking a break to look at it a lot and decide what, if anything, I need to do to finish it.

The top picture is where it is at the moment but if you scan down I have included photos of many the stages it went through.

First of all I put in a random background wash.

Next the image of the cello and hands were added in red oil pastel. This will resist the acrylic paint and enable me to scratch back to it if I want.

I start painting in and around the image and pattern of the wash. This is where the fun starts.

After this it went very dark and I forgot to take a photo. Since then I have lightened it up and the photo at the top is where it's at now.

The Golden Saxophone is Finished

I feel this Saxophone painting is finished. It's rather busy with all the patterned underpainting showing through but I think it makes it more interesting, in fact, I have enhanced the pattern in many places by backpainting around and into it. You can see pictures of the process, right from the start, in previous posts. If you like musical paintings check out my web site http://www.susanneclark.com/ and go to the musical page where you will find lots of cello and saxophone paintings with a few pianos thrown in.

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The Golden Saxophone.
A New Musical Painting.

I started a new painting this week. It's another in my ongoing musical series. What always amazes me is how a painting can take on a mind of it's own. I decided on the composition and then started to put a wash on the white canvas, as I usually do, to get it started. I textured the wash and then that's when it began to happen. The pattern of the textured background started asking to be enhanced and the saxophone demanded to be painted in gold paint! I wanted this painting to be quite abstract with the subject matter blending into the background but with all the pattern I feel it's going to be a bit overwhelming. I have added a couple of pictures showing the process so far.

This is the canvas with the textured wash and the basic outline of the composition drawn on it. You will have to look hard to see the drawing of the sax and cellos.

Here you can see where I have started to add the gold and bronze paint and begun back painting into the texture in red, in the background on the left hand side.

This shows the pattern and detail. I will simplify it all as I go along. Check back over the next few days to see the progress.

I have been putting it off for months. Procrastinating and filling my time instead by hanging out online and watching quite tedious interior design shows on TV, but the time has finally come to confront the blog.

Deciding what to write is an interesting exercise. What could I possibly write, I thought, that would be of interest to other artists and people who visit my website. Somehow though, I knew from past experience, getting started is the hardest part. Once one commits to a project and starts to work, things fall into line and start to happen, and so I am hoping that this is the case as I start with my first blog entry

I recently moved to Atlanta from York, in the UK, where I lived from late 2001 until March 2007. It was a very disruptive move as there was a long delay between packing up and finally moving into a permanent home here in Atlanta and during that time I really wasn't able to paint. Now I have my studio set up again and have completed quite a few new paintings.

I have been working for some time now on a series based on musical instruments. I started doing these a few years back because my middle son Todd, who is a musician, wanted a painting to give as a gift of appreciation to the producer he had just finished making a CD with. He suggested a cello or violin because they have a nice curvy shape. Being a good mother I immediately went to work on the suggested subject and found I really enjoyed doing it. That was the start of a whole series of cello works and then I got interested in saxophones. These paintings have been very popular with music lovers and musicians and I have sold most of them. They have also been used as posters for musical events in countries as far away as Australia and Switzerland, with my permission of course, and as the cover on an internet music society cookbook, a Christmas card for the Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera House, and on a soon to be released cover of a classical music CD.

My most recent piece "Variation on a Musical Theme 2" is a large dramatic painting of saxophones overlaying a cello and is full of bold colors as is most of my work. Now I want to continue that theme but perhaps take it in a new and more abstract direction However I have the canvas out and some ideas so I just need to start.