My iconic portraits celebrate the marriage of music and visual art, and are my way of paying tribute to musical genius — composers and artists who have changed the world and who deserve to be presented larger than life.

I am most interested in the improvisational aspects of art and music. The details of my drawings are improvised within a basic frame or outline of the form and the drawings are rendered spontaneously with a stream of consciousness flow, similar to the process of creating improvisational music.

The original artwork is six-feet high, with all details meticulously hand-drawn in pen, ink and oils. Projecting the final images allows them to take on a life of their own – as an organic part of a performance and the architecture of the performance venue.

Each compositional element of a drawing serves a distinct purpose. I draw half of my subject’s face – symbolizing my belief that we can only know a part of the make up of such great musical figures. The color selected for the background represents the composer’s essence or nature, and the geometric shapes represent musical structure.
Once inside the basic physical form of the portrait, viewers can see and take interest in the details and make up of the whole – much like getting to know a person. Repeated visits to the image allow for new and interesting details to be seen and appreciated that may not have been experienced before.

-Lennie Peterson