Jazz Personalities - Abstract Ballads: Al at the Keyboard a monotype print by Arthur Secunda - 8 decades of Fine Art Imagery, Paintings and Prints

JAZZ

It was 1943 when I first heard a record of Bessie Smith singing Gimme a Pigfoot Pete and Louis Armstrong play his solo on Cornet Chop Suey.
I was a 14 years old naïve kid still going to high school, livin in New York City. Since those youthful, exciting and awe-inspiring times for me, over the past 70 years I have traveled to many lands absorbing music and art, listening to jazz and met many fabulous artists and musicians.
Finally, I decided to record visually, some of the greatest highlights in my memory of sounds and people in jazz- so, along with my superb printer, Sharoch. Rezvani, I created this suite of almost 100 enhanced monotypes, to share what is available with the world at large.

Arthur Secunda

Arthur Secunda is an internationally renowned artist whose career has spanned eight decades. His one man shows have been seen worldwide in numerous galleries and museums in France, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Israel, and Japan. In the United States, he is represented in most major museums of the country, including the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the UCLA Museum, the Detroit Art Institute, and the Phoenix Museum. Known for his brilliant collages and striking graphics, Secunda has mastered all types of printmaking, even making his own canvas in France and Japan. His impressive body of work includes painting, mixed media, polyester assemblage, ceramics and welded sculpture. His studies began at the Detroit Art Institute as a teenager, and continued in New York at the Art Students League and New York University. After a stint in the Air Force as an artist, he then studied, thanks to the GI bill, in Mexico, Paris and Italy, with many great artists and teachers, beginning a lifelong propensity for travel-- living and working in other countries. For decades, he maintained studios in Paris and LA.

He considers himself a landscape artist, and has developed his own iconography in representing nature, the land and its forms, as well as corresponding inner landscapes. He is known for a specific kind of color gradation and blending of forms in many media. His work tends to oscillate between the serene--striated colors in landscapes--to the expressive, as in many of his oil paintings.

After years in Paris, Secunda has maintained a studio in Scottsdale and Colorado for the last decade--doing what he has done in all of the other places he has lived and worked in the last 70 years--creating imagery.