I have always enjoyed lyric opera, especially works composed in the baroque and classical periods. I don’t know why this is, I was never really introduced to the genre, but spontaneously began following the stories by reading the libretti. This helped me later when I went to Europe and had to learn different languages- it wasn’t as difficult to understand people.
When I started the street painting festival in Fresno, California, I created an original composition based on Mozart’s The Magic Flute. It was such a success that a couple of the city counsel members decided to commission the piece as an oil painting for the new city hall. Although they raised private funds for the work, there were some community members who protested the acquisition because it was not considered a work of art that followed the conventions of modernism. Once the mural was presented, the protesting stopped and the art was widely accepted. In the years that followed, I worked on numerous large-scale commissions of permanent works almost exclusively for private patrons in order to avoid these situations. Without street painting, the general public would have had little chance to see my work.
The original tonal drawings for Papageno and the Queen of the Night are available as print editions. They can be found in the print edition section of my store. Click here for more information.
