Rubber Soul

The landmark Beatles album, Rubber Soul, which came out in 1966, marked my musical childhood. It created my first appreciation for the Beatles as great musical artists. Rubber Soul’s album cover featured a picture of George, John, Ringo, and Paul, looking visibly stoned, and the psychedelic “Rubber Soul” logo with bubble-like letters. The album’s cover photograph featured a pre-hippie naugahyde brown, the black bowl Beatles hair-do’s and a pumpkin-colored logo.

All of this was terribly intriguing to me at nine years old. With this color vocabulary, 50 years later, I embarked on this painting as an homage to the album cover, but also to the breakthrough folk-rock of the album’s music. In the end, I realized in color what I grown accustomed to listening to for my whole adult life: strikes of scarlet, mixed with brown, punctuated by yellow, each stripe similar to the next, but slightly different, the way similar songs create an album that feels like an aesthetic whole, but where each song, each stripe, are memorable in and of itself.

–STELIOS author of The Oculus