When I Paint My Masterpiece
On The Mysterious Intersections Between Music & Art
“Color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.” Marc Chagall
The internal desire or compulsion to conjure something meaningful out of thin air is the same, regardless of whether the end result is a symphony, an experimental noise album or an oil painting.
Creative waters are drawn from the same deep well, so it makes complete sense to me that certain artists are deeply influenced by music, and some musicians are driven to paint. Anne Grace, curator of extensive travelling exhibition Chagall: Color and Music stated ‘Though there is no proof that Chagall ever played an instrument, music was a pervasive force in his life and work from the beginning’. His works often featured musicians - including the moon playing the violin - and dancers and acrobats, and he collaborated on costumes and stage design with the Paris Opera and the New York City ballet. Music flowed through his works.
In 1982, the beloved and far out musical visionary Captain Beefheart from Glendale, California renounced his nom-de-plume and his avant garden rock musical career to focus on Expressionistic oil painting and art making under his own name Don Van Vliet, which he continued to do prolifically for the following three decades to great acclaim.
He showed prodigious talent sculpting as a child, appearing on TV show weekly working side by side with famous sculptor Augustonio Rodriguez. He wrote all 28 songs for Trout Mask Replica playing the piano for the first time, over 8 and a half hours.
In Anton Corbijn’s film tribute Some Yo Yo Stuff, Van Vliet says “the difference between art and music, one you can physically drown in, being paint, the other you can mentally drown in. I prefer swimming in paint”.
Piet Mondrian is cited by Van Vliet as one of his favourite artists, declaring “you can hear the horns honk” of his final finished painting Broadway Boogie Woogie. Mondrian was a devoted ballroom dancer, especially loving the tango and the two-step, naming earlier paintings Fox Trot A and Fox Trot B.
Wassily Kandinsky painted inspired by listening to music and titled his paintings Compositions, Improvisations, and Impressions. He theorised “Our hearing of colours is so precise ... Colour is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Colour is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposely sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key. Thus it is clear that the harmony of colours can only be based upon the principle of purposefully touching the human soul.” Kandinsky and the composer Schoenberg, who also painted and wrote, shared an intense friendship based on their mutual passion for breaking down barriers between the arts.
Bob Dylan has been making art almost as long as he’s been writing songs, moving through different periods including oil paintings, watercolours, line drawings, pencil sketches, sometimes created to illustrate his lyrics and wrought iron sculptures.
Of his early Drawn Blank series he stated “I was just drawing whatever I felt like drawing, whenever I felt like doing it. The idea was always to do it without affectation or self-reference, to provide some kind of panoramic view of the world as I was seeing it at the time.”
In 1974, Dylan took painting classes with NY artist Norman Raeben, later declaring that this had altered his outlook on life so much that it contributed to the breakdown of his marriage and influenced the writing of Blood On The Tracks.
His recent collection, Deep Focus featured paintings inspired by movie scenes “to highlight the different predicaments that people find themselves in… life as it’s coming at you in all its forms and shapes.” His artworks are a cinematic confluence of reaching into the ether and grabbing from everything that excites him and drilling into a singular moment in the same way that his lyrics do.
James McNeill Whistler’s evocative 1875 painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket inspired Claude Debussy’s beloved classic Trois Nocturnes - even though at the time art critic Norman Ruskin famously accused Whistler ‘of flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’. Many of Whistler’s works employed musical descriptions in their titles.
After his retirement, Frank Sinatra turned to painting abstracts (and clowns, purportedly a response to the mask the performer must wear onstage), his wife Barbara reported “He was, of course, Charlie Neat when it came to painting; there was rarely any mess. He only ever had one ‘Jackson Pollock moment’ that I knew of. I walked into his studio one day and found him reaching into pots of paint with his fingers and hurling it at the canvas. I don’t think he even knew I was there. Watching him lost in a world of his own creativity, I knew that art was another kind of therapy for him.”
Joni Mitchell told Richard Skinner in a 1986 BBC interview “my talent as a writer and a musician would have burned out long ago if it wasn’t for the painting, because it’s mindless in a way”. In a 2013 CBC interview she states “I’m a painter. Always have been. A painter derailed by circumstance.” Her love for the creative process has motivated everything she’s done - she explains that art and music are different languages and she is a painter first who applies painting principles to music.
Other artistically talented musicians include Kim Gordon, Paul Simonon (The Clash), David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens), John Mellencamp, Mick Turner (Dirty Three), Anita Lane, Nick Cave, Shana Cleveland, Daniel Johns (Silverchair), Wesley Willis, Miles Davis and
who explains “I’m a worker. I do everything with the same conviction, whether I’m taking photographs or performing or painting or writing. I’m the same person.” She describes experiencing art as a “continuous exchange” of the creative impulse “whether it's with a rock and roll song where you're communing with Bo Diddley or Little Richard, or it's with a painting, where you're communing with Rembrandt or Pollock -- is a great thing.”All this talking and thinking about art and music is getting me all stirred up and I have go follow my creative impulses and work on my masterpiece, or play with some paints anyway. Thank you for reading, this is subject I’ve long wanted to delve into, I’m sure there are so many more interesting intersections to explore here…
Wishing you a beautiful and inspired day x
Lo! .. you thank us for reading! .. we need to thank yOU endlessly for writing your Loose Connections and sharing all your extraordinary knowledge of all our fave artists ... your links and information are pure joy!
THANKYOU! THANKYOU!❣️
I’d die happy if I was Whistler and had painted those falling rockets X