After many months of planning and over a year of work, Guns 'N Roses/The Cult/Velvet Revolver drummer Matt Sorum today unveils five original art pieces unlike anything any visual artist, let alone any musician, has attempted before. The first five pieces in the Art Of Drums collection marks nothing less than the creation of a new visual medium: not oil, not acrylic, but a drummer's rhythm bottled up through a manipulation of time and light and translated onto canvas as visual art. Created in collaboration with SceneFour, the Los Angeles-based creativity house behind artistic ventures with the RZA, Bootsy Collins and many other luminaries, Sorum's pieces are the first from what will over the coming months become a series of iconic drummers joining the visual art realm through the harnessing of this groundbreaking approach.
"What we found was, each drummer is a painter," says SceneFour creative director Cory Danziger about the "Art Of Drums" project, an assertion reflected in the distinct personalities of each of the five pieces in Sorum's collection. An effect recalling Jesus' face can be seen in To Sail With Jesus, while a cranial image commands My Skull, My Strength. Heart Of Ghosts conveys a supernatural, ethereal feel. Primal, aquatic imagery appears in Stone Fish. Cleopetria is an astonishing vision of a bat in flight.
Only 100 drafts of Sorum's series of canvases exist, 20 pieces of each. They range in size from 48"x36" to 30"x20", each signed and numbered by Sorum. "Drums" collections are forthcoming from Rick Allen of Def Leppard, Stephen Perkins of Jane's Addiction, and Frankie "Kash" Waddy of Parliament-Funkadelic.
For more information, visit TheArtOfDrumsProject.com.
