Jazz without words
I have been a passionate Jazz aficionado since I was about 15 years old. This was one of my very first oil paintings (when I only had four tubes of paint and one brush). I chose to paint a candid portrait of young Charlie "Yardbird" Parker. The portrait seemed to convey an eager expectation of things to come: of greatness just waiting to be unleashed onto an unsuspecting world. His expression captures how I felt about painting at the time, the skin folded over his mouth came from just experimenting with the smoothness of oil paint, but it is also symbolic of frustrated (inhibited) communication: a theme in the art of most teens.