Izzy Ampil

The richness of a performer’s spirit is difficult to fully capture; musicians in the act of playing grow transfixed with their work and become larger than life. For my concentration, I chose to focus on a small but fascinating piece of any performance: the musicians’ hands. Though taken out of context, the concrete details of these paintings – the hands’ tension, as well as formal elements like color and texture – distill the awe we experience in the presence of a great musician.

I began exploring the subject of a performer’s energy with traditional portraiture; my first piece was a colored pencil drawing that takes a conventional angle, though altered by unnatural colors, jagged lines, and the removal of the instrument involved – a piano. Though I loved witnessing a musician at work, I wanted to reverse my approach, so I focused on the musician’s hands alone, stripping the subject of explicit references to music and working at a scale that was larger than life. To emphasize and isolate the hands was to drive at the power of small, concrete details that capture an endless energy. In doing so, I did not simply allow the musician’s spirit to emerge from narrative images; instead, I infused the image with intensity by manipulating its saturation, composition, and texture. In some images, I used unnatural colors to capture a particular form of expression, like cool tones that convey the cold, ethereal beauty of a violin. In others, I explored different compositions; in two of the pieces, the hands are seen from the perspective of the pianist, tying the viewer more intimately to the musician’s mind. In most. I suggested the presence of the instrument with minimal, geometric strokes to celebrate the concentration’s musical heart while keeping the mysterious energy of hands in motion but out of context.