Evolution

I started with a piece of art that I created the other day. I kept looking at it with great pleasure. It is called “Chasing the Setting Sound.”

Chasing the Setting Sound

From a T-Shirt to Unbound Energy

I didn’t begin this as “fine art.”

I began it the way a lot of visual ideas begin in real life —
thinking like a T-shirt design.

A strong image.
Immediate impact.
Something that could live on the body, move through the world, and be understood without explanation.

That instinct comes from growing up with album covers, posters, and shirts that carried meaning without asking permission. Images that were bold, emotional, and lived with you — not hung behind glass.

That was the first form.

Wearable image.

Stage One: The Wearable Image

The early image was direct:
a hand on a guitar, energy visible, color doing the work emotion usually does.

It wasn’t meant to be polite or restrained.
It was meant to hit — the way music hits before you think about it.

At this stage, the image was doing exactly what a shirt or an album cover does best:
communicating fast, emotionally, and honestly.

But something about the shape still felt contained.

Floating Form.

Stage Three: Floating in Black

In black space, the image changed again.

Without a frame, without context, without utility, the piece became quieter — but more intense. The color and motion had nowhere to escape to. They had to hold their own.

This version felt closest to how music exists:
invisible, immersive, and uncontained.

But something was still missing.

Not explanation — recognition

Declared Presence.

Stage Four: Returning With Language

The final shift was unexpected, but inevitable.

The piece returned to its origin —
the album cover, the T-shirt, the declarative statement —
but this time with everything it had learned along the way.

The words UNBOUND ENERGY didn’t describe the image.
They completed it.

The type breaks the way sound breaks.
It doesn’t sit politely under the image — it fractures, carries force, and absorbs impact.

This became the third form of the work:
not just image,
not just object,
but image plus declaration.

What I Realized Along the Way

This process helped me recognize something important about my work.

I’m not interested in choosing between beauty and meaning.
I’m interested in proving they belong together.

The visual language of T-shirts and album covers taught my generation how to see. That language is fast, emotional, and beautiful — and it’s capable of carrying real weight.

This piece traces that path:
from wearable image,
to floating form,
to declared presence.

It isn’t an ending.
It’s a recognition of where I stand — and where the work wants to go next.

—

UNBOUND ENERGY

From Sound to Color: Where Chasing the Setting Sound Began

This photograph captures the real moment that became Chasing the Setting Sound.

It’s a live performance — a guitarist mid-phrase, mid-emotion — frozen in black and white. At the time, it wasn’t meant to be anything more than documentation. But over time, certain images begin to carry more than what they show. They hold direction.

The sound was already there.
What followed was letting the image dissolve.

Rather than illustrating the photograph, I allowed it to release its visual gravity — the physical details loosening, the sound becoming color, motion becoming atmosphere. The original image didn’t disappear; it stayed present as a referent, an anchor. What changed was the way the moment was allowed to exist.

This is the same moment, translated.

The black-and-white origin matters. It strips the scene down to structure, weight, and gesture — the raw data of the experience. Color enters later, not as decoration, but as resonance. The sound spreads outward, no longer bound to the room or the instrument, but to the emotional arc of the performance itself.

This is part of my method.

I’m not abstracting away from reality — I’m abstracting through it. Each piece begins with something specific and lived, then moves toward a visual language that reflects how sound, memory, and presence actually behave over time.

Chasing the Setting Sound exists in both places at once:
the documented moment, and the space it echoes into.

Abstraction

This work exists in referential abstraction.
The guitar is not illustrated or reproduced — it is invoked.
What remains is surface, gesture, pressure, and residue.

The image carries the memory of sound rather than its depiction.
Edges dissolve the way notes do when they leave the room.
What you’re seeing isn’t an object; it’s a trace of touch and rhythm.

I’m less interested in what a guitar looks like than in what it leaves behind —
the afterimage of vibration, the quiet weight of use,
and the emotional space sound occupies once the instrument is gone.

Melt 5 — Referential Abstraction and the Guitar Remembered

Melt 5 marks a turning point in my work.

For years, the guitar in my art was something you could clearly see — a form, an object, a recognizable instrument tied to music, place, and memory. With Melt 5, that certainty begins to dissolve. The guitar is no longer illustrated. It is remembered.

This is what I’ve come to understand as referential abstraction.

The image does not abandon the guitar. Instead, it lets go of description and holds onto essence. The curves, tension, compression, and energy remain, but the object itself begins to blur — much like memory does over time. What’s left is not a picture of a guitar, but the residue of sound, touch, and experience that the guitar carries.

The surface of Melt 5 feels unstable by design. Forms appear to stretch, soften, and break apart. Edges dissolve. What once held structure now feels as if it’s been exposed to heat — emotional or sonic — and allowed to deform. This “melting” is not destruction; it’s transformation.

At the center of the work is what I call the guitar glosso — the accumulated visual language of the guitar: curves learned by the hand, reflections burned into memory, the weight of the instrument resting against the body. Even when the guitar is no longer clearly visible, the glosso persists. The viewer senses it before recognizing it.

This is important to me.

I’m not interested in abstraction as decoration, nor realism as documentation. I’m interested in the space between recognition and feeling — that moment when something registers emotionally before the mind assigns it a name. Melt 5lives in that space.

Some viewers recognize the guitar immediately. Others don’t see it at all — at least not at first. Both responses are valid. In fact, that tension is part of the work. The painting asks the viewer to sit with uncertainty, to feel before identifying.

In that way, Melt 5 is less about guitars and more about how music exists inside us — distorted by memory, shaped by time, and charged with emotion long after the sound itself is gone.

This piece isn’t an ending. It’s a doorway.

— Bill Sanders
Cleveland Guitar Prints

Groove 8 — Studio Journal

Some pieces start with an image.
Groove 8 started with a feeling — the moment when rhythm locks in and stops being counted and starts being felt.

This piece isn’t about a guitar you can see or a player you can identify. It’s about the energy a guitar releases once it’s played — the bends, the sustain, the vibration that hangs in the air after the strings stop moving. That invisible moment where sound continues even after the hands have paused.

In Groove 8, light becomes motion and motion becomes rhythm. The lines arc and fold the way music does when it’s alive — not rigid, not measured, but responsive. Color behaves like tone, shifting and swelling as if it’s reacting to what came before it. The dark space isn’t empty. It’s the silence that makes the groove possible.

Music has always lived in that space between control and release. You can practice scales, count time, and plan arrangements — but when a groove truly locks in, something else takes over. Groove 8 is an attempt to capture that exact transition: when repetition becomes momentum, and momentum becomes feeling.

When this piece was shared on Facebook, the response was immediate and unexpected. Thousands of likes and reactions came in, along with comments from musicians and non-musicians alike who felt something familiar in it. Some saw motion. Some saw sound. Some described it as something they recognized rather than something they could explain. That reaction mattered, because it confirmed what the piece was trying to do — translate music into something visual and emotional without forcing interpretation.

Abstraction fits music because music itself is abstract. You can’t hold it, frame it, or stop it mid-moment. You experience it as it moves through you. Groove 8 doesn’t tell you what to hear or how to feel. It leaves room for personal memory — a late-night jam, a riff that went longer than expected, a moment when everyone in the room felt the same pulse at once.

Like all Cleveland Guitar Prints works, Groove 8 is created as affordable art meant to live in real spaces. It’s not designed to feel distant or precious. It belongs in music rooms, studios, listening spaces, and homes where sound and creativity are part of everyday life. It doesn’t shout or demand attention — it hums quietly until you notice it.

Some pieces describe something.
Others resonate.

Bill Sanders

Ray 10 — Studio Journal

Ray 10

There are moments when an instrument stops being an object and starts behaving like energy.

Ray 10 came from that space.

This piece isn’t about representing a guitar in a literal way. It’s about what happens inside the sound—where vibration bends form, where color replaces edges, and where music becomes physical. I wasn’t chasing clarity. I was interested in pressure, movement, and release.

The red and blue fields push against each other like opposing forces. Lighter tones act as conduits—paths where energy escapes. What’s left is not a clean image, but a trace. A residue. Almost like sound leaving a mark after it has already passed.

I’ve been moving away from depiction and toward experience. Ray 10 lives in that shift. It sits somewhere between instrument and body, memory and motion. It’s closer to how music feels than how it looks.

The title is intentionally restrained. Ray 10 suggests a frequency, a transmission, or a measured signal rather than an explanation. That tension feels honest to the work.

This piece marks another step in a new visual language I’m developing—one where abstraction carries weight, texture carries emotion, and sound is allowed to distort the image instead of the other way around.

— Bill Sanders