PAINTING SOUND

My interest in conveying sound visually in my work started many years ago and has continued to be a fascination, although a challenging one. This interest began when, on a visit to Tate Britain, I found myself in a room featuring British art  between 1900 and 1910. The explanatory notice on the wall of this gallery grabbed my attention. It read:  “What if what we see with our eyes is a limited viewpoint but, when viewed through a different lens, involving memory, experience and other sensory perception, the image can take a completely different form.” This began for me a journey into abstraction and sound.

The initial investigations into conveying ‘sound’ visually, started with bird sound which is something which captures the imagination of many creatives. The interest in birds took me far afield to Australia where the contrast in the sounds of the birds was very noticeable and I began to see that the sounds I was hearing from the birds were closely related visually with the landscape itself. I began then to study the work of the field musicologist, Hollis Taylor, and to listen to her outback recordings of the pied butcher bird songs. In these early days of listening and drawing, I used line until I became dissatisfied with the narrowness and predictability of this path into a visual expression of ‘sound’.

Now as I work with sound, I’m looking at a broader interpretation. Walt Whitman writes, in Song of Myself,

“Now I will do nothing but listen…

I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following,

Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night…”

The key is ‘listening’. Listening involves a stillness and a connection with what’s happening around us. This connectedness with the natural world creates a different kind of awareness. Simply looking with our eyes places the viewer outside – an onlooker - to the natural world, whereas listening, feeling, smelling, waiting allow for a deeper sensory perception to happen.

So listening to the sounds of the natural world and what it is saying to us brings about a new relationship of unity and closeness. There is a dialogue! My expectation is that this connectedness with the earth will bring about an awareness of a world beyond our field of vision, resulting in a higher sensitivity to the earth’s needs.

This level of connectedness is what I search for in painting. Sometimes they are pure abstraction, sometimes they hover between abstraction and representation.

Garden soundscape