Sounding like Matisse

My ever-present yardstick with metaphysical juju is ‘How can I apply it painting’? While listening to the director’s commentaries on a month of film watching (including Herr Herzog who has not been forgotten) I noted how they spoke of music and other sounds being used to enhance the mood and emotional intensities of the story. The music can also be the sound of the story.

A painting is a story and I figured that that story must have a sound or sounds, audible in this dimension but outside the range of normal hearing and well within the range of inner hearing. Given that a painting can take months, (I have 2 that are in their third year of incompleteness), sound or music could be a way of holding the emotional space memory of the process, which aligns with the painting. It’s possible that I haven’t finished these two paintings because I have forgotten what they felt (or how I felt) like when I began them.

In the painting process could be held if I hook it into a piece of music. (And this will be a note to myself when next I start something, like that)

I have two brand new canvases on my easel; I bought them a month a go. I want two still lives for my studio kitchen (which ceased being a kitchen years ago). I want still lives of the fruit and vegetables I love, strawberries, mangoes, beans, seeds, elderflower all laid on a checked table cloth and with a window opening onto a view of ‘somewhere else’. I have not been able to paint it, but I think if I could find the music to it, I could hear the painting as well as see it.

Then I thought of Henri Matisse, and had a look at one of his paintings, and I thought yes, I want it to sound like that.

Sound?
Yes!
(Maybe this inner hearing palaver has yielded some fruit after all)

I have no interest in my painting looking like a Matisse, but to sound that way, takes me closer to what I want to say. Matisse (in the painting above) is, zinging up and down unapologetically scrumptiously colouring, and exuberantly telling a story .The painterly equivalent of the visual auditory feast that is Amadeus the film.


And I am quite serious about the possibilities of ‘hearing’ the artwork before or at some point in the process of its emergence. As probabilities gather pace, intensity and ‘solidity ‘ as the ermege into fW1.

Taste, next.