SINTON FIDDLER'S CONTEST

For the first three years in which the Sinton Fiddlers’ Contest was held in October, I attended ready with my sketchbook and pencils. I have always loved country and gospel music. The instruments: guitar, fiddle, and banjo are also favorites. If I were a composer, I would write concertos for fiddle, banjo, guitar and cello. The banjo is a happy sounding instrument and this disposition is reflected in its round, happy face. The classical violin imitates a female singing voice without consonants, only vowel sounds, whereas the country fiddle sound seems descended from the bagpipe.

My painting is not actually about a “contest.” Arriving early in the day, I observed the jamming sessions, those intimate, joyous, and casual groupings of friends practicing their music. These were relaxed, totally noncompetitive moments. The October mornings are beautiful, golden and bucolic. People of all ages, children, and elderly moved about with their instruments, relaxed and happy doing what they love to do. In my sketchbooks are all the people playing in this painting and their names are written on the sketches. This was a truly witnessed event, marked in time, place, and season. Music and art are natural companions. Of all the arts, music is the most beautiful to watch. The sensuously shaped instruments hovered over by their devoted players are like lovers, like mothers cradling and breastfeeding their young. Instruments and musicians become one flesh, extensions of each other. Does the musician sing to his instrument or does he just listen to its singing to him? The secret power of music is that it organizes and sanctifies silence. A medieval philosopher once said “the craftsman puts meaning into substance.” It could likewise be said of the musician that he puts meaning into silence. In my painting, I hoped to place the viewer in the music rather than at the concert. We are close in here. The painter has stepped aside, and now, you the viewer are in the intimate contact I enjoyed. It was a beautiful morning outdoors and full of sunlight and shadow and people making joyful sounds.