Some of my earliest childhood memories are of art and music. I clamoured for pencil and paper so that I could draw – anything and everything. Certain pieces of music sent strange tingling feelings down my spine at a tender age too. Sketching, painting, listening and performing subsequently became central to my emotional and intellectual life. As I grew up I soon realised that I would not become a mad, bad and outrageously gifted extrovert artist such as the tempestuous painter Caravaggio or the charismatic trumpet virtuoso imagined in my dreams and aspirations. I had to settle for something less, given my limited abilities, but I was fortunate enough to end up in a music career which brought me into contact with many immensely talented composers, songwriters and musicians. Later on I also moved into the world of art and new friendships blossomed there too.
Creativity in art and music excites me, and, for the last fifteen years, I have explored the relationship between these disciplines. Apart from continuing to paint I’ve researched the history of each subject and collected information on visual artists inspired by music and composers stimulated to write music which was influenced by fine art or artists. I discovered that the Renaissance masters Giorgione and Leonardo Da Vinci were also musicians, whilst on the other hand, the composers Mendelssohn, Granados and Schoenberg were enthusiastic artists. More recently in the twentieth century many songwriters and instrumentalists in the pop world have had art college backgrounds and some have painted successfully. Much of my own art has been inspired by composers, songwriters and their music. It was for this reason that the website is called “Art and Music”.
Some years ago, one of my abstract works based on the music of Richard Strauss shown below was analysed by an expert who thought I probably had synaesthesia, a condition of the senses.
Richard Strauss and His Music – this painting was shown on BBC 4 television during the interval of a promenade concert in 2006
The assumption was that when I heard musical sounds I saw colours. Well, the simple answer is I don’t but there are clearly musicians and artists that do. The composer Messaien was one such individual and I found a number of artists who do have it and produce some fascinating work in response to listening to music. Many important artists have analysed and written about the relationship between art and music, most notably Wassily Kandinsky (who corresponded with the composer Schoenberg, also a keen painter, on the subject) and his fellow teacher at the Bauhaus, Paul Klee. Shape, form, colour, composition, harmony and rhythm, words common to art and music, came under immense scrutiny during these exchanges and explorations. Apart from the painting above inspired by the music of Strauss there are many others on this website created just by listening to music or knowing something about the composer and the story behind the music. Obvious examples are Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring.
Stravinsky as a fairly young man
A contemporary interpretation of The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky
Although many paintings are derived from classical music, I take equal pleasure from using other kinds of music as a basis for creating a painting. Sir Peter Blake is high profile artist who has explored the world of pop music and musicians. Apart from his iconic album cover collage for the Beatles Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, his subjects have included Elves Presley, The Beachboys, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Spice Girls and Robbie Williams. At Walthamstow Art College Blake befriended art student and singer/songwriter Ian Dury, who wrote Peter the Painter for Blake’s Tate Retrospective in 1983. Blake later reciprocated by painting Dury’s portrait for an album cover. It’s not widely known that Dury himself was a superb pop artist and the Royal College of Art was home to an excellent exhibition of his work a few years ago.
I’ve produced many paintings which have used song titles or titles of other kinds of music. My inspirations have been songwriters such as Elvis Costello, members of Pink Floyd, the Who, The Black Eyed Peas, Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Lily Allen and Guy Garvey of Elbow. Some are figurative and others just happen and emerge from the sounds I hear when I listen. Here’s one more abstract which is totally imagined from the ‘colours’ I heard (but didn’t actually see) in a piece of music. It’s definitely not synaesthesia but it was it was from listening to Pink Floyd.
