c) the contradiction
Feb 4th, 2009 by freereed
I have discovered some principles of great correspondence and resonance in nature, music and painting. There was no form, language or method for what I discovered and wanted to express, so I had to invent it. I reached out for something that was not ”there” and it was there! and that!
These paintings have been years in development. They are a logical extension of all the music studies I have done over the last seven years. All my drawings of musicians are graphic expressions of music. Every note a line. The first drawing here, the young fiddle player. Those lines on the lower right are not lines descriptive of the human form, right leg and shoe. Those are the lines of the notes of music he was playing at the time.
With my artist friend Tsuyoshi Kitami I worked out theories of the shape of sound. With some of my musician friends in Clare I worked out the colour of major and minor keys.
These are not ordinary sense perceptions. Neither is this what is populary known as “synaesthesis.” These concepts are as old as Bach’s “Chromatic Compisition.”
Our world of sight and sound presents itself to us in wavelengths - frequencies of energy. Sound and light share the same wave at the level of electromagnetic frequencies. We cannot hear the sounds the dog hears, or see UV rays, but they are there all right.
The Contradiction; This is the first painting of this series it’s full of contradictions. The painting ing is not the tune itself but rather the notes of my fiddle as it, not I, is able to play this tricky tune. The Contradiction goes up to a high E, but doesn’t leave a handy ladder for you to climb back down safely.
The notes spiral around clockwise the low G string just right of center. D string vertical blue, A string horizontal yellow, E string vertical veridian. That long yellow band is the A, as in AACABADACAEA.
This painting is the musical palette as I found it, somthing like a child’s coloured xylo- phone. C natural is claret or rose madder, C# is Japanese orange, D is cerulean blue.
Here’s another contradiction, as blue and orange colours are polar opposites on the colour wheel.
The gap between them is too extreme for the progression; so I cooled out the orange and warmed up the blue so they could peacefully coexist in spite of their difference.