Painting as Visual Music

If I had to call my recent work by a single name, it would be 'Visual Music' — the making of sound into something the eye can see.

A black rooster sits in a chair, reading a musical score. The floor begins as piano keys and continues into a checkerboard receding into deep perspective — Bach's fugal architecture becoming the architecture of space itself. In the air, marks like Miró and Kandinsky drift like notes. It is the moment music becomes visible on its own.

The invisible vibration, upon a visible surface.

Many voices as one

In this painting, Kandinsky and Whistler, Bach and Shakespeare are all present. Voices from different eras and genres overlap and sound together on one surface, like the several voices of a fugue. Within that overlapping, I wanted to make the sense that the image carried by Kandinsky's black, together with the piano and the lattice of the floor, sinks further and further into depth — the structure of music drawn down into space.

Why music

I believe painting and music, in the end, reach toward the same place. For me they have been a lantern — the thing that steadied me when I was lost and wandering under a dark night sky. So I have always wanted to give the vibration of sound a visual language. In a way, it is the work of holding the invisible — feeling, time, vibration, memory — in the form of the senses. My hand, holding the brush, may in fact be playing an instrument.

It has been a joy to share the stories of my paintings across these essays. I hope that one day, in the studio, you will take up the brush yourself and paint your own music.