From Cello to Stone - Set of Six Bikkers' Monoworks and Three Lithograph Portraits Now Available

IMAGES: [upper left] Rudolf Bikkers and Yo-Yo Ma inspecting Bikkers' From Cello to Stone mixed-media work (the work "Suite No. 6 - Gavotte" being shown in the photo); [above right] Bikkers and Ma before one of Bikkers' limited-edition stone lithograph portraits of Ma; [first work after text] Yo-Yo Ma portrait (edition of 75); [second work after text] mixed-media monowork, "Suite No. 3 - Bourrée"; [third work after text] Johann Sebastian Bach portrait (edition of 75); [fourth work after text] mixed-media monowork, "Suite No. 1 - Allemande."

One goal of the blog is to let folks know when a works or works become available. And so we announce that Rudolf Bikkers’ From Cello to Stone, one-of-a-kind set of six monoworks interpreting J S Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites (as interpreted in performance by Yo-Yo Ma), is now available along with three limited-edition stone lithograph portraits of Bach, Ma and the artist. Click through HERE or on any of the above links in the "Images" section to see larger versions and also to scroll through the entire set of 9 works. The monoworks have been created by a combination of colour lithographs pulled from limestone and acrylic painting. The entire set of nine (9) works, accompanied by an elegant steel case, is available for $30,000 Canadian. Outside the set, the three limited-edition portraits are available for $1650 each or, as a set of 3, for $4400. The edition for each portrait is 75.

Of the From Cello to Stone works were released a decade ago, Robert Fulford, one of Canada's greatest all-time arts writers, writes that, like Bach’s music and Ma’s interpretations of that music, “Bikkers’ prints have achieved the bracing, clear as- a-mountain-stream clarity that illustrates a remark by Northrop Frye: ‘The simple, which is the opposite of the commonplace, is normally one of the last secrets of art to be mastered.’” Fulford concluded his essay entitled "Seeing Music" by noting how the works of both Bach (the Cello Suites) and Bikkers (the visualization of Bach’s music) share a “wondrous sense of order,” adding:

Order can never be far from the mind and instincts of artists, whether musical or visual. We humans are pattern-making animals. We spend much of our lives searching for an order that transcends, in a place we cannot name, the chaotic world in which we live. Art, says Schopenhauer, rescues us, if only for a short time, from our narrow, limiting obsession with self, and moves us “into the state of pure knowledge.” This is the achievement of Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites in the Yo-Yo Ma performances, an achievement to which Rudolf Bikkers provides a richly appropriate accompaniment.