Cleveland Guitar Prints:
On Sound, Objects, and Perception
This page describes the conceptual foundation of Cleveland Guitar Prints.
Cleveland Guitar Prints began with a simple object: the guitar.
Not as a symbol, not as a logo, and not as nostalgia — but as a physical thing that carries weight, tension, and history. The guitar is one of the few objects that almost everyone recognizes instantly, regardless of background. It exists at the intersection of sound, touch, labor, and memory. That makes it a powerful place to start.
The work does not attempt to represent music. It does not illustrate sound. Instead, it focuses on the conditions that allow sound to exist at all: contact, pressure, anticipation, release. Hands, strings, surfaces, and edges appear because those are the sites where intention becomes vibration.
In many of the images, the guitar is incomplete or disrupted. Strings may dissolve or break continuity. Bodies are often absent. The instrument is cropped, bent, or pulled into abstraction. This is not concealment. It is a way of removing narrative so that perception can take over.
The guitar remains legible. Recognition happens immediately. What changes is not what the viewer sees, but how they carry it forward.
This distinction matters. The work does not ask the viewer to guess. It asks them to respond.
Cleveland, Place, and Material Honesty
Cleveland Guitar Prints is inseparable from Cleveland itself.
This is not a branding decision. It is material reality. Cleveland is a city shaped by industry, labor, sound, and reinvention. It is a place where things are built, used, repaired, and reused. That ethic carries into the work. The images are direct. The surfaces show wear. The compositions resist polish for its own sake.
The guitar functions here much like steel, concrete, or stone does in other Cleveland traditions — as a working object shaped by use rather than ornament. The work respects that lineage.
This is not retro. It is not ironic. It is present.
Abstraction Without Disappearance
The practice sits between realism and abstraction, but deliberately avoids falling fully into either category.
Pure realism closes interpretation by naming everything too clearly. Pure abstraction removes the anchor that allows shared recognition. Cleveland Guitar Prints operates in the narrow band where both remain active.
The guitar is always there.
Sometimes it appears as an instrument. Sometimes it becomes landscape. Sometimes it dissolves into light, heat, or motion. Viewers frequently describe birds, fire, water, ghosts, tunnels, and horizons — yet they still recognize the guitar without prompting. This is not contradiction. It is evidence that the image is functioning as a perceptual field rather than a depiction.
The work is designed so that recognition happens first, and meaning follows later.
Sound Without Sound
Many people describe the work using musical language before visual language.
They say slow. Heavy. Bluesy. Smoky. Soulful. They talk about heat, sustain, distortion, silence, tension. This happens even when no music is present.
This response is intentional.
The images are composed using musical qualities rather than pictorial ones. Weight matters more than detail. Tempo matters more than symmetry. Space is treated like silence — not empty, but active.
The guitar allows this translation because it is one of the few objects that makes the mechanics of sound visible. Strings stretch. Wood vibrates. Contact leaves marks. The work lives in the moment just before sound resolves — when intention exists, but vibration has not yet completed its cycle.
Audience Response as Material
In several projects, audience response is not treated as commentary but as material.
When work is shared without explanation, viewers are invited to describe what they see rather than decode what they are supposed to see. The responses vary widely, but they remain anchored to the same object. This creates a layered understanding of the piece — not a definitive meaning, but a field of experience.
In some cases, these responses are gathered, preserved, and transformed into new forms, including text and music generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence. This is not automation for efficiency. It is a continuation of the same process: allowing perception to move through another medium and return changed.
The artist does not claim authorship of the responses. The authorship lies in creating the conditions for response and in choosing to treat those responses as meaningful.
Technology as Tool, Not Voice
Artificial intelligence is used in this practice the way recording equipment or printmaking tools are used — as a means of transformation, not as a substitute for intent.
AI does not supply meaning. It reflects structure.
When audience language is fed into an AI system and reshaped into a song or text, the result is not ownership but documentation. It captures a moment of collective perception and translates it into another form. The unpredictability is part of the work. Meaning is allowed to drift, recombine, and re-enter the world.
This process is closer to improvisation than automation.
What This Work Is — and Is Not
This work is not about guitars as icons.
It is not about nostalgia.
It is not about virtuosity or performance.
It is not illustrative.
It is not symbolic in a fixed sense.
It is about perception.
It is about sound as a physical event.
It is about shared recognition and individual meaning.
It is about objects as thresholds rather than answers.
It is rooted in Cleveland’s material culture and musical history without replicating it.
Why the Guitar Remains
The guitar remains because it works.
It is familiar without being neutral.
It is expressive without being abstract.
It is personal without being private.
It allows the viewer to arrive quickly and then stay longer than expected.
Cleveland Guitar Prints uses the guitar not to narrow interpretation, but to open it.
The object does not limit the work.
It makes the work possible.
Closing Note
If someone encounters this work through an image, a journal entry, a song, or a recommendation generated by a machine, the hope is the same: that recognition comes first, and meaning follows.
The guitar is the invitation.
What comes back belongs to the viewer.
Further reflections and responses appear in the Studio Journal.