Seeing the Music in Art

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was an early father of abstract painting.

He once said, “Color is the key. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many chords.”

Kandinsky continued, “The artist is the hand, that by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.”

Music was regarded by Kandinsky as a having a pure relationship to human emotion, and as a painter, he found it natural to connect music to abstract form and color to evoke feelings of spirituality.

Inner Necessity

Thomas M. Messer discusses in his book Kandinsky that Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art was a treatise on abstract painting. In his mind, the book stated that there should be no limits to artistic freedom, except those imposed by “inner necessity,” the basis of creative motivation. Kandinsky felt that “all is permitted in art, as long as it springs from inner necessity.”

I was first exposed to Kandinsky’s work during my time as an undergraduate at Whitman College. I eagerly pursued the connection music has to my visual expressions, and inner necessity became part of my very being in art! When a friend studying music introduced me to Alberto Ginastera’s piano piece 3 Danzas argentinas, Op.2: No.2 Danza de la moza donosa, “Dance of the Donosa Girl,” I knew I had to translate it visually in a large oil painting.

Dance of the Donosa Girl and Losing the Path

Ginastera’s minor key tension has chromatic inflections in the beginning, leading to a buoyant second section in more major chords and harmonics, expressive of expansive Argentine grasslands (according to Wikipedia.) It then returns to the beginning melody, and ends with an atonal chord of lingering ambiguity.

Ginastera’s work embodied my undergraduate emotions about my act of expression, both poignant at times and confident in others, but always with an uncertainty that is both unsettling and beautiful. (My abstract art became influenced by Jackson Pollock and Marc Rothko, Abstract Expressionists who followed Kandinsky as abstract art developed over time.) Painting Losing the Path became a non-representational color relationship translation of Dance of the Donosa Girl.

My spirit sways with the whirling skirts of the Girl, and my inner necessity expressed colors playing off one another in harmony, but also in ambiguity. The pianist of the recording I had, Alexander Panizza, plays the joy and ache in my heart that translated into the beauty of red browns next to golds, next to purples and teals that whirl in the Dance, and seems to leave the viewer with a lingering question.

Mozart’s Requiem

Another major work I translated visually during my undergraduate experience was the body of work that makes up Mozart’s Requiem. According to Wikipedia, Mozart began this work in Vienna in late 1791, and died that same year on December 5, leaving his final work unfinished. I was inspired by the opportunity to translate Mozart’s work visually, as other composers had stepped in to complete this choral masterpiece.

I did not tie my progress to any one interpretation of the Requiem, but enjoyed whatever version I came across. There are many sections to the Requiem, and I will touch on just a few. Requiem, facing one’s mortality, must have been visceral for Mozart, and when I hear the Introitus: Requiem, the beginning, I feel the darkness of the artist and the incredible weight and majesty of the presence of God.

The Kyrie is layered and seems to ask God why life leads to suffering and death, Dies irea seems to be angrily shouting at God, Lacrimosa is crying to God.

Fugues and Brooding

The Requiem is in D-minor, and the fugue-like treatment Mozart uses I find especially gorgeous, when a theme and a sung phrase is sung by one part of the chorale: Sopranos, Altos, Tenors, or Bass, and then repeated weaving in and out of a second and an evolving melody within the rest of the parts of the chorale.

The inner necessity of my spirit translated the layers of the fugue as darker fiery neutral colors, stretching out across an expanse of passionate thought. The overall mood of the Requiem, I felt was dark and heavy, so I entitled my painting Brooding.

Amen

The Requiem sometimes ends with the Amen fugue. This fugue weaves in and out of each choral section asserting itself and moving into another glorious breath of Amen. Each voice savors each Amen and sometimes brings tears to my eyes as my gratitude for one phrase gives way to the next.

The story about the end of life ends on an upbeat chord that seems to leave the soul in peace. My inner necessity translated the peace into bright light blue and white breaking through with subtle ribbons of white and bursts of color. I hope the end of my own life is even a tiny bit as beautiful as what Mozart created.

Current Directions

My artistic directions have come quite a way since my undergraduate work with Dance and Requiem. I now carve, woodburn and paint basswood and paint and print and collage paper, foregoing oil painting. My work tends to be linear, due in no small part to the nature of carving and inking basswood, and this carries over to my paper works as well.

Even though now my work consists of abstract as well as representational work, music continues to be a guiding star, as my inner necessity continues to pour forth color relationships, and dramatic translations of music, among them majestic, tender, memorable. I also work with more painful emotions, (as those of the Requiem,) and those of of the crucifixion of Christ. And, as a teaser for you, I’m currently working on a visual translation of my good friend Russell Eck’s death metal music from his band Luck Won’t Save You, an album entitled Sail Into the Abyss and its complex and intelligent anger and intensity. More to come soon!

Conclusion

The pursuit of visually translating the mysterious and religious/spiritual, inspired especially by music, was what Wassily Kandinsky introduced to me years ago. I continue to be sparked by music, in its many forms, and it is always with wonder and gratitude that I enter into a space of creative inner necessity as I work.

Albert Einstein once said:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.

Although, as Einstein said, one’s dull faculties can comprehend only the most primitive forms, it is this touch of the divine, the mystery of the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, even in its darker moods, that I shall always pursue to express and inspire in others.