Throughout my life, music and painting have been the twin pillars of my artistic world.

As a toddler I would sit next to my father on the piano bench as he played music of all kinds.

He would play Chopin, folk tunes and whatever sheet music we had around. And, as I sat there, I soaked it all in.

            There was always music in our home. It was just part of the fabric of our lives. When I was a young teen living in London, I discovered Bach.  I went to concerts at the Royal Philharmonic Hall and small chamber orchestras playing in empty churches.

I began to draw to music around that time, freeform ink sketches that expressed what I was hearing in the music.

            I have played piano since I was very young, but never mastered the art of sight reading. Instead, I play what is in my head. There is a lot of music in there! 

In my studio there is a piano that mimics the feel of a concert grand, though the sound isn’t quite the same. Nevertheless, the Kawai ES8 is a great piano, that takes up very little space, unlike a 9-foot-long grand piano.  

            My easel is at one end of my studio and the piano is at the other. I frequently move back and forth between the two.  Lately, I have noticed that the music I play is influencing how I paint.  I can sit down at the instrument and easily fill an hour with music that never repeats. It is almost entirely made up, though I sometimes begin with a piece of Bach or Beethoven, then the music evolves around the keys I was in, taking off in endless variations.

            I’m painting this way, too. I get something going on the canvas, an abstract beginning.  When I don’t know where to go, I play piano for a while.  When I return to the painting, I see something in it, much the way I hear a theme in what I’m playing.

 

            That theme begins to develop and becomes an image, emerging from the abstract chaos.  If I can hear the music in my mind, I can usually play it.  With painting, if I can glimpse something, a person perhaps, I can usually paint it into existence.

The feeling is a lot like dreaming.  A stream of randomness, begins to develop into a story in my dreams and then takes on a reality that makes compelling sense at the time.  On awakening, the story line that had seemed believable, falls apart as wakefulness takes over.

With my music and paintings, however, I am seizing the random thinking and not allowing it to dissolve, but instead, riding it wherever it’s going.  In the process, I’m making something out of nothing. Empty canvas and tubes of paint become an experience.

            Along with the notes, rhythm is vitally important. The pattern of beats and syncopation, translates in painted pattern that run through the images.  Music is a moving, pulsating thing, rising and falling with emotion. That describes something of how I am painting these days.

            One composition that fascinates me is Pictures at an Exhibition, by Mussorgsky. I have recordings of it in the original piano form as well as the version orchestrated by Ravel that we are all familiar with. 

            That piece moves through many parts, all related to the original theme.  Dreamlike, it drifts into somber passages, followed by insanely frenetic sections, then into rather frightening, gigantic passages. The finale never fails to thrill me, as it returns to the Great Gates of Kiev, but now with everything the orchestra or the pianist has.  And then it goes even further!

 

Before the end, a theme of almost religious solemnity and beauty appears, staving off the massive, astonishing finale for a moment longer.

I have painted and drawn to that music countless times, attempting to capture in art what I hear in such magical music.  I will probably never capture it, but I love trying!  I don’t want to paint the “pictures” in that exhibition.  They don’t really interest me. Instead, I’m attempting to paint the colors of emotions that it evokes.

There is an irony to my being inspired to paint images by a piece of music that was in turn inspired by paintings in a long-ago exhibition. That kind of circular influence brings me great excitement!