Painting Sensation: Sound

The painting class I'm taking is focused on engaging your senses to inform your work on a particular subject.  We are to learn to create atmosphere and color by reacting to sound, smell, touch, taste... not exclusively our vision.  Depending on one's aptitude, this can be quite a difficult task.  For the last few weeks we've been exploring sound and rhythm in our paintings.

To get us warmed up to working in this manner we completed several studies on bird calls (pictured above).  The first call was a cheerful song - the type that would wake you up in the morning.  The second was a barn owl, and the third call was low, hushed and quick.  We were instructed to first react to the sounds by mixing colors we would associate with the call.  Then develop a form that responded to the rhythms and tones we heard.  Creating the forms was the biggest challenge to me. I ended up describing the atmosphere of the places I would most likely encounter these birds (morning, night, and dusk).  It really does always come back to the landscape.

The final sound pieces was our reaction to a symphonic piece of music.  It was very eerie and left one with a question, a feeling of uncertainty.  I'm sure I've heard the music on a movie soundtrack before.  The music was much longer than a birdcall, and it had several movements.  This composition is also much larger than the studies.  Here I deliberately sketched out ambiguous forms before I began painting and then reacted to the music in color.  I must have had ceramics on the mind... I feel like I could sculpt these forms out of clay.

I'm quite sure none of these are successful and that this is not the method which I am meant to work.  I don't see music beyond a dim image of what the notes would look like on the page.  We had an assignment similar to this in third year landscape at LSU... we were to react to music in a 2D form and use that image as the basis for a design of a rooftop garden.  It was one of the few landscape projects which I was not proud of, one that I didn't succeed with.  I think I'm just too literal, and practical.  Too much freedom.