music. “Ernie Barnes depicts being Black very well—he knows how to visualize us in a true and genuine way,” Venna observes. “There are certain nuances in his work that only certain people would understand.” While Barnes, who passed away in 2009, toured art institutions across the U.S. with his traveling exhibition The Beauty of the Ghetto , the public has largely been introduced to his art through pop culture rather than museums, galleries, or academia. It’s a reminder of how music can open a doorway to visual art, a principle that Venna applies to his own work.“I’m all about having tangible art that we can touch, hold, and feel within our palms and fingertips,” he explains. “That’s why I got [Russian artist and designer] Alina Gibadullina to paint the artwork for my single ‘Prophet,’ which we sold alongside prints of the Malik artwork. I’m trying to have notable pieces of art that people can own and hang on their walls.” As our conversation draws to a close, I ask Venna how his future music might take shape. Keeping things close to the vest, he says he prefers to let the process unfold organically. “I don’t really premeditate a lot of things,” he avows. “I can premeditate a feeling, and that’s what [is] happening now. I’m understanding what [I] feel I want to give off moving forward. In the meantime, I’m continuing to build my own catalog of references of things that I like and admire.”
navigated the demands of a rapidly-prospering career. That piece would later serve as the reference for the artwork French painter and animator Lossapardo created for Equinox . “There were these deer running, with a kind of red sun around them while it was nighttime,”Venna says, reflecting on the painting. “I later looked up the meaning of equinox, and learned it’s about balance.At that point in my life, I was struggling to find that equilibrium between my personal life and music.” For Venna, the way music and art move in tandem has come to crystallize a fundamental belief: that they share the role of being vehicles of emotion.“Art is as honest as music, as they [each] depict history. It’s our job to create this diary of history. Someone’s got to do the physical side, but someone [has] to create the sonic palette of what we’re going through. I see myself as a historian of sound.” This philosophy is one that Black musicians have consistently found echoed in the work of Ernie Barnes.Though Marvin Gaye’s I Want You is the most widely known instance, Curtis Mayfield, Donald Byrd, the Crusaders, and B.B. King also licensed cover art from Barnes’s catalog of paintings.These artists mutually found in his work an aesthetic that resonated with the sounds they were creating. That resonance also led to a second, slightly different version of The Sugar Shack appearing in the closing credits to the late-’70s TV sitcom Good Times , alongside the show’s iconic theme
WaxPoetics 145
Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting