To begin at the beginning: visual art is one thing. It uses specific senses and parts of the brain. Music or auditory art is another thing. It uses other senses and parts of the brain.
When you paint, you use your sight and your touch.
You think in terms of composition, shapes, colours, texture, light, lines.
When you compose music, you use your hearing, your sight, and your sense of motion.
You think in keys, notes, pitch, rhythms, waveforms, time.
When you do both, you make things that…look right, and rhyme.
Binary or on the spectrum?
I work at two forms of art; music and painting. And I see images of music, and vice versa. As a result, I have written songs about paintings, have made paintings that depict songs, poems to describe paintings, and songs from poems, about paintings. You get my meaning? The common element in all these art forms, is narrative.
As it has always been, every song, every painting, every poem, and every book tells a story and has a message. Every story has a creator who sends it to someone in some form, who receives the message and discovers the story. The language and medium differ, but the intention is the same – to communicate. It’s literally a case of art speaking to you.
Without narrative, meaning, and sharing, I’m not sure I’d call something art, or even real. If no-one hears your song, reads your book, or sees your painting, does it exist, does it function? Is it worth the time, and does it matter?
And is this a binary situation, where something either is or isn’t, or is it on a spectrum of significance and existence? Well, these are the conundrums that keep me awake at night.
A song about painting, and paintings about a song
While producing our song, Perfect You, in 2024. I started painting a portrait of my songwriting partner, the man who inspired the song. It wasn’t successful, but I kept trying. A year and many flops later, I had painted more than forty portraits of him, mostly in acrylics. By now, there are over a hundred. How did I get into this situation?