How do you paint Music?

There seemed to me to be an obvious connection between the expressive content of music and abstract art that I was eager to explore. Actually finding the method to translate between the languages of temporal arts (music) and physical arts (painting), required more experimentation. After some consideration, I decided on video, with its strong visual and temporal elements to bridge the gap.

Each performance begins with a blank canvas, and by playing a piece of music, we channel the emotive quality of the song into our painting process, finishing the painting simultaneously with the music. Through this process we created a hybrid audio-visual creative experience, in which the true art piece is the captured performance, and the resulting physical canvas is merely a residue.

My relationship with Beethoven is older than my passion for abstract art, and from the moment I started considering this concept I knew I had to try painting his symphonies. Getting together a group of 10+ friends in the Berkshires, we performed all nine symphonies in one day, creating paintings to each piece of music, and recording videos of the process.