Ella Fitzgerald by William C. Leikam

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Ella Fitzgerald - Jazz Master

Art and The Last Painter: Bruni

© 1998 William C Leikam
Painting of Ella Fitzgerald © Bruni Sablan

Ella Fitzgerald c Bruni Sablan

The purpose of lyrics and the music that rides on their backs is a clear reminder of who we are, and yet sometimes we cannot speak-- much less consciously know--what's being said. Art extracts from us the depths of ourselves.

Art, art of all types and styles, dredges up from deep inside our souls the clear rhythm of our heart. Such a natural rhythm may be brought up through computers, through light, the stroke of a key creating images, the stroke of a pen or even a crude pencil on paper, the rough stroke of a brush on canvass, tight lips on a trumpet or fingers on a keyboard can all become art.

Some few in the world hear that rhythm. They are either the artist or the people who recognize and hear it's song. They were those who gravitated to Picasso when, in the early '20s he couldn't find a soul to buy his paintings. The commercial people of the day said that his art was weird and had changed and whatnot. There were others, later in that decade, who came along and "heard" from his brush the images and the feeling that he produced. Art is littered with the corpses of those who struggled and no one paid attention to until years later.

How many of us have heard a new song and it speaks to us? It clarifies who we are. You are compelled to say, "Yes, yes this is it. This is what I feel." The lyrics, the instruments playing, define art for you at that time and in that place. You have no choice and it rings in your heart for years to come. You look at, you listen, you are in harmony with this thing, this sound, this-before-you and it taps into something deep.

Bruni Sablan is just such a person. She's not an artist. She's a woman who hears and sees the rumbling images deep inside, pays attention, holds a brush in her hand and slaps her soul out there on a blank, white canvass. Each stroke of her colorful brush is a stroke of love and pain. When those strokes are finished and she reaches out to take the painting to the Old Town Art Gallery, she has no idea what she has done but she, like all artists, must let it go to the world.

She was an actress who could never conform to the sex kitten image that the film industry wanted from her. She, in no uncertain terms cried, "No. I won't do that." She left Hollywood and went north to the Santa Clara Valley, back to her parents. Married to a Hollywood film producer, having lived the Hollywood high life, daughter Christy in hand, she fled into her heart without even honestly knowing what she was doing. Down deep in the bowels of the original Old Town in Los Gatos California, one night when we sequestered ourselves in the basement and she told me of her past. So much went down in that studio. Tall tales could be told but they aren't relevant here.

I was there when she began the Jazz Master Series, although at the time none of us knew what it would become: The world's largest single collection of paintings, her painting of Duke Ellington is part of the permanent collection in the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Bruni had always been associated with jazz. She had been a jazz singer. She knew the people who performed. She was intimate with jazz and it was the music that she played on the old tape deck as we all painted. We traveled out to jazz gigs when the best jazz musicians alive were in the San Francisco Bay Area. We went to Yoshi's, Garden City, The Bach Dynamite and Dancing Society, Pearls and Kimball's in San Francisco.

Everywhere we went, sketchbook in hand, she took the image of the musician directly from the stage. Then Bruni rendered a sketch, inflaming color appropriate to her feeling. You see it on the canvas. It's in the eyes of those she's painted. Eyes and their expression reach out to one who sees these paintings. Such is art.

Her first painting in the series was huge, according to my view of what a painter does, but at the same time, back then, I was new to the painter's scene. Bruni always called it "painterly." The painting was predominantly pink with all sorts of jazz musicians in a kind of painted collage. One of the most prominent is Smith Dobson, jazz pianist. The frame was bent because the stretch bars and backing were not all together. No matter what its shortcomings, it began the historical "Jazz Master Series."

Visit Bruni's own website for more of her fabulous paintings.

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