Most of us experience a piece of art only after it is completed - such as watercolors or oil paintings hung on the walls of a museum or in our homes. There is so much to interpret and question not only about the artist's meanings but also their methods in creating their piece of work as well as the colors they choose. Many artists have unique styles. Jackson Pollock developed his painting technique into a whole movement called 'action painting.' His 'drip' style of painting eliminated traditional brushes, palettes and easels. Pollock said, "My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting."
Artist Zach Smithey's style and process is similar to Pollock's - from mixing the paints, to laying out the 3 huge canvases, to standing all 3 up on end and watching the paints run in rivers of color to the floor. This beautiful video combines the work of 2 artists, a painter and a musician - both inspired by color. It shows Smithey's creative process - his 'painting in action' - with the soundtrack provided by the Chamber Music Society of New York performing Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time: Movement 7."
Smithey says, "Colors I depict in my art are an emotional response to sound. I use color to pay homage to the impermanence on sound. Sound travels space and time. My paintings and sculptures are an attempt to bring permanence to an impermanent medium."
Messiaen's method for composition was also unique. He believed that birds were the 'greatest musicians' and found their songs facsinating. He also experienced a mild form of synaesthesia manifested as a perception of colours when he heard certain harmonies, particularly harmonies built from his modes, and he used combinations of these colours in his compositions. This is why this particular video is so powerful: it combines the color and the music almost as if one has a hand in creating the other.
“I am…affected by a kind of synopsia, found more in my mind than in my body, which allows me, when I hear music, and equally when I read it, to see inwardly, in the mind’s eye, colors which move with the music, and I sense these colors in an extremely vivid manner… For me certain complexes of sound and certain sonorities are linked to complexes of color, and I use them in full knowledge of this.”
—Olivier Messiaen, in conversation with Claude Samuel, 1976
"The music of French composer Olivier Messiaen is inextricably connected to color. Messiaen was synesthetic—when he heard music, he saw colors. Although Messiaen’s chamber music masterpiece, the Quartet for the End of Time, tells a powerful religious story, the music is nevertheless intensely colorful in a tradition dating back to the French Impressionists. Tristan Cook, the brilliant young filmmaker whose work has illuminated Chamber Music Society events in the past, gives us a provocative interpretation of the work that explores the colorful side of Messiaen."
—David Finckel, Co-Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society
(Thanks to wikipedia and chambermusicsociety.org for information for this post.)
Enjoy!