The second “fortune” of the Art Oracle card on Wassily Kandinsky (explanation here) was:
Hear Music Thru Sight
Yep. That was the inspiration for today’s offering. The challenge was “How do you depict that?” To my recollection, I’ve only tried this once. In college, I took a Costume Design class. One of our first exercises was create a drawing or collage or whatever to visually express the music that was played. How does the music make you feel? How would you depict the rhythm, the beats, melody, etc? Does the style of music evoke any images? Etc. Great, scary exercise. I had no idea. But there wasn’t a wrong answer. If you could explain or justify your choices, then you got it. (I still remember the song was called “Sweet in the Morning” and my drawing was a geometric pattern with a red, orange, yellow gradation. Sunrise, I guess. Perhaps a bit too literal but it was honest.)
So for this piece, I didn’t think of a specific song but rather a musical scenario. You know that moment in Radiohead’s Creep where it’s all melodic and Thom Yorke-y but it’s suddenly sliced into by Jonny Greenwood’s harsh guitar? That’s what I was thinking of. Also this was done on the day of the shooting in Thousand Oaks, CA. Where things are uneventful or humming along until it’s violently interrupted. I also was thinking about echoes and hearing a loud BANG! and it dissipating. I tried to show that with the lessening of the holes and the red.
This is an exercise that I will definitely try again. Randomly pick a song and see what happens.
