The Body as a Musical Score

A rooster wears music over its whole body. Treble clefs and hearts, eighth-notes spilling down the body like water from a fountain. In its hands, a viola made of a spaghetti squash, played with a bow of a single stalk of garlic.

The body as a musical score. Every feather is also a note.

This painting is, in the most literal sense, the body as a score. The music has settled gently at its ear: every feather I draw is a note, and every plume of the tail a chord. What you see when you look at the painting is what the rooster hears — its sound made visible on its skin.

Painting the invisible

Music cannot be seen. And yet I have long believed that the surface of a painting can hold the invisible vibration of music. This is the one idea that runs through all my work — the synesthetic proposition.

Kandinsky said that color is sound. I wanted to go one step further, to carve that sound onto the body through brushwork and color — and with humor. The spaghetti-squash viola and the garlic bow are my own way of delivering this serious proposition with a smile.