Thursday, March 24, 2011

The Wedding

French Impressionists revelled in the musical nightlife of Parisian cafe society. Degas painted The Song of the Dog in 1876 while artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, and Seurat sought to bring the sometimes raucous sounds of the music hall to their work. Degas' work, however, is often as much about capturing the noisy, smoky, slightly degenerate look and feel of such musical venues as in the music itself. But it was only as painters began to move beyond genre into the art of Expressionism that music and painting were finally able to merge. Marc Chagall's late work, The Wedding, dating from 1961, is one such piece. In it he manages to fuse the bride and groom in his Jewish wedding scene into one entity. The groom is seen upside down (head over heels in love?). Likewise, he also merges the cello and the cello player. It's as if the instrument is playing itself. Indeed, unlike the all but hidden musicians in Watteau's work, Chagall's music makers occupy at least half the canvas while at the same time he employs strident reds and oranges amid the otherwise dull trappings of the wedding experience to draw attention to the most dominant sounds. One can almost hear the music.

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=g&p=a&a=i&ID=1127

Jacquie

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Looking around on the Web.

The more you look at the relationship between music and art, particularly music and colour, the more there is to think about.  Here are some related web sites:

Colour Psychology Click here to read what David Johnson had to say about colours.

Click here to see the results of painting while listening to Celtic song called The Storm by Morning Hearts and then a piece called Smooth by Santana and featuring Rob Thomas.

Canberra Artsound FM 92.7 broadcast an interesting program at the beginning of March this year.  It focussed on music inspired by the visual arts, including, of course, Livingston/Evans: Mona Lisa but also Goyescas, a piano suite written in 1911 by Spanish composer Enrique Grandos, Schuller: Seven Studies of Paul Klee, and Paulus: Air on Seurat.  Click here for more information.

Jacquie, Tricia & Tim

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Our name in music

I have created a tune based on the alpha characters of The Tin Shed Art Group.  I laid out the alphabet then assigned each letter a note based on the notes of the stave ie c,d,e,f,g,a,b and it is musically quite pleasant although I had to resolve it by adding two notes at the end.  I am thinking about making an art work based on this tune - just for fun.  I will bring my flute and play it to you on the 7th.

Peggy

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Pictures You Could Whistle

I have been surfing a little to explore the work of Wakelin and De Maistre, the Australian artists who developed  a system of "Colour-Music". 

From Wikipedia:  "In 1919 De Maistre held a joint exhibition with Roland Wakelin titled Colour in Art to expound his theories. In this, at the time controversial. art exhibition the musician-turned-painter had chosen colours to harmonise like the notes in music. This "colour-music" exhibition became part of Australia's art-folklore as "pictures you could whistle". Influenced by earlier exponents of "colour-music" theory in Europe and America, this exhibition has since been identified as the earliest experiment in pure abstractionism in Australia. His colour charts, showing musical notes corresponding to different hues, are now owned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with "colour music" gaining a permanent place in Australian art history. "

The best site I have found so far is at http://home.vicnet.net.au/~colmusic/maistre.htm

and there are some examples of De Maistre's work there.

 http://johnaslanidis.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Colour-in-Art-Revisiting-1919-The-evolution-of-colour-and-music-in-Australian-painting-22-August-27th-September-2008-.pdf  gives an overview of what happened after their exhibition and mentions more recent Aust artists who have explored the music-visual art connection.

I had not heard of that phrase "pictures you could whistle": maybe there is a suggestion there somewhere for some intriguing title for our own show!


Tim