Painting Irish Music
I have discovered some principles of great correspondence and resonance in nature, music and painting. There was no form, language or method for what I discovered and wanted to express, so I had to invent it. I reached out for something that was not ”there” and it was there! and that!
These paintings have been years in development. They are a logical extension of all the music studies I have done over the seven years preceeding my beginning the music paintings. All my drawings of musicians are graphic expressions of music. Every note a line. The first drawing here, the young fiddle player. Those lines on the lower right are not lines descriptive of the human form, right leg and shoe. Those are the lines of the notes of music he was playing at the time.
With my artist friend Tsuyoshi Kitami I worked out theories of the shape of sound. With some of my musician friends in Clare I worked out the colour of major and minor keys.
These are not ordinary sense perceptions. Neither is this what is populary known as “synaesthesis.” These concepts are as old as Bach’s “Chromatic Compisition,” and Plato’s “frozen music”.
Our world of sight and sound presents itself to us in wavelengths – frequencies of energy. Sound and light share the same wave at the level of electromagnetic frequencies. We cannot hear the sounds the dog hears, or see UV rays, but they are there all right.
The Contradiction; This is the first painting of this series it’s full of contradictions. The painting ing is not the tune itself but rather the notes of my fiddle as it, not I, is able to play this tricky tune. The Contradiction goes up to a high E, but doesn’t leave a handy ladder for you to climb back down safely.
The notes spiral around clockwise the low G string just right of center. D string vertical blue, A string horizontal yellow, E string vertical veridian. That long yellow band is the A, as in AACABADACAEA.
This painting is the musical palette as I found it, somthing like a child’s coloured xylo- phone. C natural is claret or rose madder, C# is Japanese orange, D is cerulean blue.
Here’s another contradiction, as blue and orange colours are polar opposites on the colour wheel.
The gap between them is too extreme for the progression; so I cooled out the orange and warmed up the blue so they could peacefully coexist in spite of their difference.
I searched everywhere in the musical spectrum for violet and I could not find it, so it’s not here. (I later found violet in a chord on “Rights of Man”)
Colour Theories 2009
:I am working on a new colour octave: R, O, Y, YG, G, BG, B, V. (This would be da Vinci’s pallette) Physics labels the octave: R, O, Y, G, B, I, V…. So one might use: R, O, Y, G, B, I, V, RV….
Miles Davis — George Russell
I am also studying the music theories of George Russell who had such a profound effect on Miles Davis.
Russell :”My aim at this point is to understand the language of music in its deepest sense and contribute to it, enrich it,” “Music as a living thing, a component of the emotional center of all living things. It speaks not only to the emotional center, but also to the intellectual and physical centers. What it has to say must be understood. I want to see in the meanings of music more deeply. I want to know the inner of everything. My music is trying to tell me that so I can tell the world.”
MIles: “I started to write in the modal form and on “Milestones”… I really used that form. Modal music is seven notes off each scale, each note. It’s a scale off each note, you know a minor note. The composer-arranger George Russell used to say that in modal music C is where F should be. He says that the whole piano starts in F. What I learned about the modal form is that when you play in this way, go in this direction, you can go on forever. You don’t have to worry about changes and shit like that. You can do more with the musical line.”
Russell: “Russell: “The foundation of The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization is that the Lydian scale is the true scientific scale, in the sense that it gives birth to the basic unit of tonal gravity, which is the interval of the fifth. That’s how music behaves.”
And that is how colour should behave. A perfect fifth in colour is not red, yellow, blue as these are the colours at their peak of intensity and difference. They have been called primary because, as in prime numbers they cannot be a result of mixing any other colours. A perfect fifth in colour would be more like what Miles is describing, analagous colours moving into the major or minor modes.
Riffing In The Key of A
key of A in this example is Cadmium Yellow Pale
Is this Miles/Russell Perfect Fifth?
The chart is from Richard Shmidt “Everything I Know About Oil Painting” For every colour there is a chart like this. I think this is what Miles was talking about.
