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Retired UM professor Jim Todd discusses painting “Blind Mexican Musicians”
Summary
Jim Todd, a retired University of Montana professor and Missoula artist, described the origins, composition and influences behind his painting “Blind Mexican Musicians,” citing a photograph by Casasola and a year-and-a-half work process.
Jim Todd, a retired professor of art and humanities at the University of Montana and long-time Missoula resident, described his painting “Blind Mexican Musicians” during a public presentation in Missoula.
Todd said he completed the work about a year ago after roughly a year and a half of work. “The title of it is Blind Mexican Musicians,” he said, noting the painting is a derivative image taken from a black-and-white photograph by the Mexican photographer Casasola.
The photograph, Todd said, appeared in a pictorial history of Mexico and showed students at a school; it lacked detailed caption information. Todd said he removed some elements from the original photograph and kept the individual portraits of the musicians because “that’s what moved me about the photograph.”
He described how the faces in the source photo conveyed blindness — “their eyes were empty or there was that kind of vacant, distracted quality” — while still allowing the individuality of each subject to come through. Todd said the painting synthesizes several long-standing interests: Mexico, music, social conditions, race issues and variations in printmaking and color. “It sort of brings synthesizes a number of things that have been of interest to me,” he said.
Todd explained compositional changes he made to the source image: he centered the musicians, added a second door to enhance symmetry and created a slightly off third-dimensional perspective on the floor to produce a mild visual dissonance. “I put the musicians in the center and then constructed two doors to add to the symmetry and then developed this kind of odd, third dimensional perspective on the floor, which is deliberately slightly off,” he said.
He also discussed technique and influence, saying much of his early work is black-and-white printmaking but that Mexican color traditions — especially peasant art — influenced his later use of color. “I got more of my influence in color from Mexico than I did from Europe,” he said. Todd said he often blends fantasy and photographic sources in his work and that some symbolic elements, such as the doors in this painting, remain personally ambiguous: “I think the doors symbolize something, and I haven't been able to figure out quite what.”
Todd closed his remarks by identifying himself and the painting: “No. I'm, Jim Todd, and, this is my painting Blind Mexican Musicians. Alright. Thank you, Jim.”
