How do a painter and a musician make work together? What elements of creative process are shared between music and the visual arts? And perhaps more interestingly, what are the divergences?
Music (without focussing on the fixed document of the ‘score’ or the ‘recording’) is an ephemeral, auditory time based art form. The visual arts (or to be more specific for this exposition ‘line making’ such as drawing/ painting/ printmaking) are tactile, ocular and spatial defined compositions.
Musical performance (particularly music which involves structured improvisation) is both a product and process which exists only in real-time. In painting the creative process is frozen within the final product, it is perceived by the viewer without the artist present and for an almost infinite possibility of time.
The underlying conundrum between music and painting then is one of sensual perception.
Music is perceived primarily through the ear and painting through the eye.
How then, as a musician, can I make sound in response to what I see?
How can the visual stimulate musical composition and improvisation?
My workspace (The Drawing Room) in the Burren College of Art
The instrument to the foreground is my custom built 'sarode'.
The central tenet of this exposition is that taking inspiration from the visual is not purely about ocular stimulation.
Experiencing art is a perceptual rousing of the core.
To appreciate art we use our human perception through the body and the senses.
I understand that perception, whether it be through sound or sight is about letting things go inside us only to realize that we are part of them already. To paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, that we are 'made from the same stuff'. This is the phenomenological origin of creative process. We make music and we experience art to 'awaken an echo in our bodies' of something already there. What is one the outside of the body is not separate from ourselves.
As Merleau-Ponty describes, 'things and my body are made of the same stuff... their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility ...the body welcomes them (1945: 4). These ‘things’ to which Ponty refers, I would argue, may be perceived through any of our senses. In this exposition the things which we perceive to be part of us could be sounds, objects. or a multitude of human emotions. In this framework, painting or musiking are simply external forms of an inner perception.
So, I would argue that when I perceive a painting, it arouses in my body, in my perceptual understanding of something that is already there. 'Things have an equivalent in me', as Ponty would describe. To make a musical response to the painting is not about attempting to abstract the technical process of the art work but accessing this primal perception. Creating work from this body-centric knowing reveals how a painting and a piece music are connected by the same 'carnal formula of their presence' within my perception(Merleau-Ponty 1945: 4). Understanding and accessing this felt-sense of knowing became a key part in my creative work during my residency.
Yet at the same time, I want to know more about the sympathy of creative process than simply saying its about feeling.
If it is our perceptive states which reveal the carnal forumla of the essence of things, then what is happening in our perceptive states in the creative process?
How is this manifest in making music-live with an instrument/ in recording and through composition?
'things and my body are made of the same stuff...they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence' (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 4)
At the same time, each day I would explore textures, lines and rough icons using black (and eventually orange) ink and printing from wood & lino cuts.
Both my musical and visual work were partly responses to the rough rocky landscape of the Burren. But also the rough textures of my music and prints are part of my long held aesthetic orientation towards DIY, grass roots folk music and post-rock.
These were the primary research questions I asked myself during a one month artist residency in the Burren College of Art in Ireland in May/June 2018.
My research methods involved recording a body of new compositions while also exploring my own print making using lino and wood cuts. Concurrently, I extended an ongoing collaboration with visual artist Timothy Emlyn Jones by attempting to make musical responses to two of his large scale paintings.
Initially I began working on my own compositions which combine a custom made North Indian lute called the sarode, loops, drones and electronics.
I was running my instrument through a digital interface into a computer program called CHUCK.
I used this program to manipulate the sound of the instrument and also create drones and textured rhythms.
I also used the unique acoustic properties of the sarode and looped them live using a pedal to make drones and textures.
