Kaitlyn Cropanese is an artist who believes she was born with music in her veins. Her grandfather sang, yodeled, and played the guitar before she was even alive. He was a natural performer, who appeared on the radio and in recording studios back in the 40’s and later became a professional guitar player, recruited for weddings and other gatherings, playing songs of the time. In addition to her grandfather, her grandmother would sing her to sleep every night. She was no professional, but hearing her voice and recognizing the same familiar melody was always comforting to her and she believes it was their musical influence that brought about her passion for music.
Kaitlyn focuses on representing the personalities of those she knows on a personal level through basic images, memories, and/or portraits. Because of the passion she has for music and the admiration she has for her grandparents, combining her artistic skills with her passion for music go perfectly hand in hand. In her piece titled Muzart, Kaitlyn sanded and gessoed a wooden acoustic guitar, painted the front, sides, and back with oil paint and even carved into the back of the neck. Instead of just a musical instrument with strings, Kaitlyn turned Muzart into a rotating piece of art with a soundtrack and blue light radiating from the center.
On the front of her guitar, she incorporates memories of her grandfather through the images on the postcards, ranging from a tomato plant to the Knights of Columbus symbol. The sides include vibrant roses and calla lilies and on the back is a portrait of her grandmother. Audrey Flack has a method similar to hers of combining multiple images that don’t always seem to go together, but somehow sync together beautifully when painted as vibrant and lifelike as she paints them. For example, in her piece titled Queen, Audrey combines a slice of orange, a rose, a queen of hearts playing card, a locket, a pocket watch, an apple, and a chess piece. The more one looks, the more he or she begins to enjoy the beauty and vibrancy of the piece and are able to draw conclusions or ideas on their relevance or positioning. However to Audrey, the piece was like a Baroque vanitas image, representing the inevitable passage of time and the briefness of youth and beauty.
Audrey’s World War II incorporates images of that time period such as the Jewish star, a lit candlestick, which she states was "a memorial to bridge time between 1945 and the present, to burn always in the present, and a photograph of the Holocaust.” By incorporating postcards in the background of each image, Kaitlyn too gives her piece an element of time, while also incorporating distance and the life of a traveling musician. By incorporating postage stamps, addresses, folded edges, and discoloring of the paper, She’s exploring the idea of old and new, (similar to the rotating guitar stand), time gone by since the postcard was received, and the wear and tear on the receiving end, which is proof of the importance of a memento.
Kaitlyn's Unchained Melody allows her audience to leave an inscription behind as a gathered keepsake. Not unlike Christian Marclay’s Record Without a Cover, where Marclay transformed his piece into this evolving sound of record blurs caused by adding physical words on the reverse side, she is taking a CD and converting it through meaningful words and messages. The CD’s, like Christian’s record, do not include any cover or protection and are being tossed into the guitar case to overflow with each and every toss. Similar to the permanent written inscriptions on the CD’s, Kaitlyn also chose to carve into the neck of her guitar with an electric etching pen. The physicality of carving into layers of wood is similar to changing the surface of a CD with permanent mark making and a release of emotions.
