Painting Music
The concept of a moving line brings with it the concept of a temporal as well as spatial art. If a line moves it may be treated like a melody. there may be two of more voice and even counterpoint.
”Rowland History of the Modern Movement. 1976
Notes tones, major and minor keys, scale, melody, harmony. resonance, rhythm, chords, vibration,tempo, vibrato, staccato, compostion, improvisation, arrangement, orchestration. theme & variation, interval, repetition, passage, counterpoint, These are words common both to the language of music and painting.
A painting. any painting, is as a tune that hangs in the air. There is a world in a painting, just as there in a world in a tune. The difference is in form and in time. In painting, every note we play affects every other note simultaneously. The notes and chords we play do not fade away. but we can manipulate our notes to make them louder or softer, warmer or cooler, to advance and recede in space.
Music is the stuff that has no substance.
Painting is the music of colour vibration, line movement, and form interaction, giving form to the formless. Vibration movement and interaction are qualities of living things. Paintings have the properties of living things – that’s what excites me about painting. That’s what l’m on about.