Dov Zeller's Blog - Posts Tagged "music"

art with violins

This is my first GR blog post! Hope you enjoy and look forward to hearing your thoughts.

In my first published novel The Right Thing to Do at the Time , I write about a violinist who is inspired by niggunim --Jewish melodies that are hummed, often during times of prayer, and to which verses of psalms or other liturgical poems are often sung.

I love niggunim as well as the violin and I love the way violin music that comes out of Jewish traditions sometimes takes themes from niggunim (sometimes upbeat, sometimes melancholy, rich, and soulful, sometimes all of the above) and converse with them and explore and expand on their themes.

For a little while, in my early thirties, I tried to play the violin. (For my thirtieth birthday I gave up riding motorcycles and bought myself a violin.) I even had a lesson with one of my favorite klezmer violinists! It was not the best lesson, but fun to meet someone whose music I appreciate so much.

Well, lately I've been enjoying exploring the paintings of Soutine and when I found his violin portrait (still life? if anything by Soutine can be considered 'still'
) I found I kept going back to it and looking at it again, trying to understand the strange mood of it and the violin's placement between a baguette and a fish. Perhaps music is sustenance. And the fact of an instrument not being played a kind of sadness? I wonder if this was painted at a time when Soutine was impoverished and scrounging for meals and material for still life paintings--and painting what he would eat before he ate it.Not that I am saying he ate the violin...(It almost looks like it's made of taffy, or that it's under water and the water is rippling as Soutine paints it.)

In any case, I decided to go in a search of other paintings with violins. I found some really intriguing images and wanted to share them. If there are images you'd like to share please post them in comments!

Thanks and best and hope you are all managing as well as possible.

Soutine