Exploring Music, Rhythm and Sound in Visual Art
Can we hear a painting? I keep returning to this question when I paint in response to music. I want to do more than illustrate a piece or recall its mood. Could an image itself invite something like listening?
The more interesting question, however, is not whether images can technically be converted into sound, but whether a painting can evoke something comparable to musical experience: rhythm, tension, silence, repetition or resonance.
Music and Painting Across Art History
The relationship between image and sound can be approached from very different directions. Neil Rusch and Sarah Wurz, for example, have interpreted objects shown in a Cederberg rock painting as musical instruments [1]. That is an archaeological question, distinct from my own experiment, but it reminds me how much a silent image can suggest.
A more immediate encounter was the Roberto Matta exhibition at the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien in 2024 [2]. His interpretations of Mozart stayed with me: a musical association could become an entire visual world, rather than a picture of musicians.
Personal Experiments: From Opera to Ambient
My ongoing project, “The Magic Sea,” explores the interplay between music and visual art. Richard Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk – a synthesis of music, poetry, drama and visual art – has fascinated me for many years [3]. This initial effort focused on capturing the mood and world at the bottom of the Rhine, where the Rhinemaidens guard the gold.
In a subsequent work, Overture, I tried to approach the anticipation before an opera begins. I imagined sitting in the auditorium as the conductor raises the baton and the curtain starts to rise. The blue and red forms leave that moment suspended, before the stage has fully revealed itself.
Challenges and New Directions
Further attempts within Wagner’s Ring cycle made the difficulty clearer to me. My expressionist approach could suggest a stage or a dramatic atmosphere, but I was less sure that it conveyed the movement of the music.
I varied the approach with Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. To me, the dense greens and dark, interlocking forms suggest some of the music’s weight and complexity. Yet I still found the result largely descriptive: it offered a landscape for the sound rather than an equivalent of its unfolding.
Finding Harmony Through Reduction
Mindfulness exercises had led me to pay closer attention to the intervals between tones. Listening to solo shakuhachi music [4], I found a different starting point: a single tone, the breath that sustains it, and the silence around it. This music sample gives a sense of what I mean.
What I hear in these intervals has a parallel in painting. An unpainted passage can change the force of a mark beside it, just as a pause changes how I hear the next tone. In the painting below, the pale forms emerge from a dark, textured ground. Their separation matters as much to me as their shape.
Returning to Western music, I listened to pieces from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach. Their clarity and apparent innocence suggested the blue work below. The light forms and small dark openings became my response to sparkling tones and depth within simplicity. I could imagine the image on an album cover, though the music remains far richer than any single image I might make.
Embracing Complexity and Modernity
Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, originally composed in 1978, offered another way forward [5]. Its restrained material and mirrored phrases interested me because repetition can deepen attention rather than merely repeat an effect. In my painting, the pale forms and their darker surroundings became a response to that experience, rather than a visual score.
While some sounds seem to me to be floating, I see the sounds of the xylophone as jumping. Only when they are in the air do they tell their story.
In Emptiness, Space, and Depth, I introduced related works in which reduction played an important role. The final image here returns to Brian Eno, whose music often accompanies my work. It is associated with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, his studio collaboration with David Byrne, first released in 1981 [6]. The painting is a personal response to its layered sound, rather than a record of a live concert.
The Experiment Continues
I do not expect a painting to reproduce music. What interests me is whether visual elements – rhythm, repetition, gesture, color and empty space – can evoke something comparable to the experience of listening. Music unfolds in time; painting appears to exist in space. Somewhere between the two, however, there may be a shared language of movement, tension and silence.
For me, this remains an open experiment.
Footnotes
[1] Neil Rusch and Sarah Wurz, “How we brought to life the music of an ancient rock painting” (2022). Their interpretation concerns the objects depicted and their possible sounds; the colour enhancement makes the pigment easier to see. Image © Neil Rusch.
[2] Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien exhibition programme: Roberto Matta, 24 February–2 June 2024.
[3] Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, and his use of recurring musical motifs have fascinated me since my youth. They remain personal points of reference for my work.
[4] The shakuhachi is a Japanese bamboo flute. My comparison here concerns the solo music I was listening to, rather than every style played on the instrument.
[5] Arvo Pärt Centre: Spiegel im Spiegel, including the original violin-and-piano version of 1978 and its mirrored melodic structure.
[6] Nonesuch Records: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Brian Eno and David Byrne, first released in 1981.
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