Since my painting of Aaron Swartz, The Ghost in the Machine, was so well received I painted a 24″ x 24″ black and white portrait of Nina Simone. My hope is that you will find it to be as stark and as powerful as Hozier’s tribute to her and other singers in the US civil rights movement is.
Nina Simone (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003) was born in Tryon, North Carolina to a Methodist minister and a handyman and occasional preacher. She was named Eunice Kathleen Waymon. She learned how to play piano by ear when she was three. She played the piano in church as a child, but did not sing in the choir. By the time she graduated high school as valedictorian of her class, she was an accomplished classical and jazz pianist, as well as a singer. The townspeople raised money to pay for her to go to Julliard, however her family had moved to Philadelphia, so she applied to Curtis instead. They rejected her application. She felt this was due to racism. This killed her hope of being a great, black, woman, classical pianist. She started teaching music to get by. She also started to play and sing at some nightclubs. One night she decided it would help her career to change her name. She chose “Nina” which means “little girl” in Spanish and “Simone” after the actor Simone Signoret.
She wanted her singing to count for something, so she chose and wrote songs to record that addressed racism, lynching and civil and human rights. This was a risk at the time for a young, black woman in the 1950s and 60s. Her recording career spanned four decades. Her rendition of Strange Fruit is haunting.
“We never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution – real girls’ talk.”
-Nina Simone
For more of her bio and discography, check out www.ninasimone.com.
The painting is acrylic on 24″ x 24″ stretched canvas.
Price: $320 plus postage.
SOLD!
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