Painting a Visual Response to Music - Rachael Singleton

Many artists have been inspired by music and have tried to express its rhythms, structures, and tones in their visual works.
Examples include Henri Matisse, who created a series of colourful cut-outs based on jazz music; Piet Mondrian, who painted geometric compositions influenced by boogie-woogie music; and Paul Klee, who used musical concepts such as polyphony and harmony in his abstract paintings. Wassily Kandinsky’s synesthesia allowed him to create some of the most mind-bending paintings based on the music he listened to. He played the violin from an early age and even gave his works of art musical titles: ‘Improvisations’, Compositions’, and 'Fugue’. Music was also so important to Chagall that the term was the theme of an impressive exhibition of his work at the Montreal Museum of Modern Art in 2017


Here are a few of ways to think about creating art inspired by music:

• Listening to the music and drawing what comes to mind.  It could be a memory or picture of something you want to paint or a response that isn’t representational 
• Mark making by moving your body to the music or imagining the movements
• Exploring which colours and lines/forms you associate with the piece, and develop this into a colour scheme and style to use for a future work of art or design
• Mirroring musicality with marks. Loud - heavy / grand scale.  Quiet - soft slow lines or particular colours.  Tempo - long or short marks, repetition, pattern making
• Consider the emotion it evokes - colour, makes, scale… 
• You could come with some small thumbnail sketch areas to fill with some marks and colours 
• Or bring your concertina sketchbook and add some elements to a couple of pages as you listen