2008 Batik painting series.

A Painterly Approach to Music

Both music and visual art involve putting down layers until something fully formed emerges. You do your preliminary sketch; you build your skeleton, then you start an additional area. You put your first mark on your canvas. It's the same way you lay your first bed whatever it might be, a piano part or bass part. It's exactly the same process. The foundation of music is really poetry. How are music and images inextricably linked? Music simultaneously come out of working with images, watching history & observing the daily life.

The images in this exhibition are, in part, a response to my observation during my travels and also the listening to my own heart through music. Music begins the moment one breathes - the heartbeat causes rhythm; a living person utters words and responds to varying sounds around him through hearing. Not all are fortunate to experience music, however, with art the possibility to transmit music to humans through the eyes is limitless.

In each canvas there is some suggestion of human figures and natural figures (flowers and leaves) floating in indeterminate space, but beyond that, the canvases represent a full spectrum of moods, densities, colour schemes, and brushwork.

Some music, jazz, for example is a gestural language, a form of musical expression that gives free rein to the musician's thoughts and feelings, allowing his or her whole being to determine the ultimate shape of the music, not just its interpretation. It has this quality in common with much contemporary art, abstract expressionism especially, an art form which is also gestural, and which, like jazz, is the tangible record of an artist's journey through a related group of themes or ideas.

Both paintings and music employ the principle of contrast, playing with varied textures, colours, densities, opposing light to heavy, hard to soft, slow to fast. Running on similar tracks, each of these complementary art forms enhances the capacity
of the viewer/listener to become engrossed in the other. By examining the relationship between music and visual art, you will experience a variety of modes of attention, from sharply focused looking and listening to free-floating contemplation, and many states in between. You will also discover a scribble, whether aural or visual, can be the most personal, the most expressive, and the most revealing of gestures

Musical Landscape

Musical Landscape is an attempt to capture the energy, movement and random composition of a piece of music. This series is a collage of a few simple shapes: spirals, circles, curves and wavy lines. Arranging and rearranging the elements can be both fun and frustrating, but I continue experimenting and adjusting until the composition sings.