Gil Scott-Heron was a poet, musician and cultural provocateur whose fusion of jazz, blues, soul and spoken word helped lay important groundwork for hip-hop. This digitally reimagined portrait celebrates both the warmth of the man and the restless creative spirit behind one of America's most distinctive voices.

As it was for many people, my introduction to Gil Scott-Heron came with the 1971 release of Pieces of a Man, the remarkable album that included his signature work, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” His combination of jazz, blues, soul, poetry, humor and social observation sounded like nothing else. I deeply regret that I never had the opportunity to see him perform live.

In 1984, I opened The 16th Note in San Francisco, the first music venue in the city to feature hip-hop, so I had a front-row seat as a new musical language began finding its audience. It made me particularly happy to hear echoes of Scott-Heron in the rappers and hip-hop artists who followed him—an influence that remains unmistakable fifteen years after his death.

For this portrait, I began with Roger Woolman's wonderfully intimate 2001 photograph of Scott-Heron: smiling, cigarette in hand, weathered and completely at ease. I digitally deconstructed, posterized and recolored the photograph, pushing it toward the visual vocabulary of Andy Warhol's photographic silkscreens. Saturated orange, turquoise and violet collide with halftone dots, rough registration, distressed marks and deep graphic blacks.

What interested me most was the contradiction. Scott-Heron's work could be confrontational, political and uncompromising, yet Woolman's photograph gives us something wonderfully human—a mischievous smile and a moment of apparent ease. The aggressive Pop palette amplifies that tension, transforming an intimate photograph into something closer to an icon while allowing the personality underneath to remain intact.

• Available on: Watercolor paper, wood panel, metal panel, or gallery-wrapped canvas
• Maximum size: 50 × 40 inches
  Source photograph: Gil Scott-Heron courtesy of Roger Woolman — Imported from 500px (archived version) by the Archive Team. Licensed under CC BY 3.0. Photograph digitally modified and transformed by Travis J. Parkin.
  
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