New OnionsWhen I teach I like to work on the student’s painting and explain what I am doing and why. One day I noticed one of the students taking notes while I was talking. Out of curiosity I asked her what she had just written. “Torak thinks in music” she responded. She could not have been more correct. I hear painting. Many people get a picture in their mind when hearing a piece of music, a landscape perhaps. When I am painting I hear what I want to paint. Not as specific notes but as rhythms, harmonies, dissonance, dynamics. I heard New Onions as something by Rachmaninoff. Big, dramatic, powerful. There were bold, almost opaque, passages and others transparent in their delicate nuance. Much of it seemed technically challenging, dazzling in its virtuosity. There were moments of rich complexity and broad sweeping passages. Yet when taken as a whole there was great unity and harmony. Not quite symphonic but more than a prelude…variations on a theme perhaps…..
3 comments:
Hi Tom. Great site. I admire your work very much. Tell us more about what you hear. The connection between hearing and your painting is interesting. Are you also a musician? Are you describing something that you hear as you study the subject or hear as you apply the paint? The latter suggesting the idea of dancing the paint onto the canvas.
Thanks for your kind words. I'm not a musician but music is a large part of my life. It's difficult to describe how I hear a painting and frankly I like it being mysterious. It's probably a mild form of synesthesia. I perceive the rhythm in the folds of a piece of drapery as Brahmsian and then apply my brushwork to create that effect. It's an involuntary experience. I do like your idea of the paint dancing onto the canvas. I've never thought of it that way but I suppose it does.
I love classical music, especially opera. Although I grew up with pop and rock music I never hear that when I'm painting. It doesn't have enough musical vocabulary to describe what I see.....
Congratulations on a wonderful blog site! I enjoyed what you said about music also. I heard a Varese piece at a concert the other night and was reminded of its spatial and cubist visual references.
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