Since 2014, I have combined my themes of portraiture and perception with my interests in Old Time music. I explore the tension between depicting portraits of actual people and depicting my sitters as actors and fictional characters in a story. I am interested in particularity and the countless visual sensations afforded by working from life, which seems to have an aural counterpart in Old Time musical traditions of learning and transmitting music by ear.
Although I am interested in particularity and perceptually based visual phenomena, I also use perception as a gateway to invention. If the perceptual data or formal elements of my painting suggest that something invented will make my painting stronger, I will paint it. I will also exaggerate, amplify, and distort perceptual phenomena if it will make my painting more exciting visually and psychologically.
In these works, I paint about Old Time songs and tunes I know well. I name most of my paintings after titles of songs and tunes. A few of my paintings' titles are of songs and tunes that I knew during my childhood before I ever heard of Old Time music. These were among my favorite childhood songs. I knew them from cartoons and television commercials I watched as a kid, such as Bugs Bunny, Looney Tunes, and the Golden Grahams cereal television advertisement of 1976. Consequently, I not only examine each song's provenance, history, story, cultural message, and social significance but also my personal relationship to it.
My paintings celebrate a slice of Americana , which has a long and enduring history in the Piedmonts of North Carolina and Virginia in addition to the mountainous regions of the Southeast. (Please note: where live, in Greensboro, is in the middle of the North Carolina Piedmont). During Old Time music's golden age in the 1920s and again during its revival in the 1950s and 1960s, enthusiasts, professional musicians, and ethnomusicologists traveled to these regions to learn how to play this music, listen to stories, and understand the music's cultural and social significance from the old timers.
Old Time music speaks to me so much that I have become an Old Time musician myself. Taking up clawhammer banjo in 2014 has helped me to understand better the cultural messages embedded in Old Time music. I learned that many Old Time standards originate from outside the Upland South and are much older than the twentieth century, dating as far back as the 17th and 18th centuries from the British Isles, Colonial America, and the Antebellum Minstrel stage. Frequently these songs challenge the stereotype that Old Time music is white, rural, and Southern. "Golden Slippers" is an example, having come from the minstrel stage in the 1870s and written by an African American minstrel performer and composer, James Bland. Bland based his song upon an eponymously titled African American spiritual from before the Civil War.
These paintings are big, six to seven feet in the longer dimension. Because of their size and complexity and my belief that the best painting consists of repainting, these paintings take six months to a year of steady work to complete.
Michael Ananian
