Why Visual Art
‘Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument...As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense.’ C G Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature Vol. 15 (Routledge, 1967)
It is often by way of the other that we locate an understanding of the present, and with this in mind Connecting to Music uses visual art to help children explore music. Of course music and art are very different art forms, one aural, the other visual. However the doing, the making, the working with physical materials to create something new, can connect us to the ‘innate drive’ that the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung speaks of, just as we are connected to the inner world when we become active listeners to art music.
Anthony Storr in his book Music and the Mind (Harper Collins, 1992) writes, ‘Painting, architecture, sculpture make statements about relationships between space, objects, colours. These relationships are static. Music more aptly represents human emotional processes because music, like life, appears to be in constant motion’.
Many artists have been inspired and influenced by music, and many composers have been inspired by visual art. Composer Claude Debussy loved JMW Turner’s sea pictures, while painter Wassily Kandinsky was inspired by the music of Arnold Schönberg. Artist Paul Klee held Mozart as ‘the ultimate pinnacle of art.' Source: Hajo Düchting, Paul Klee Painting Music (Prestel Verlag, 2002). The American composer Morton Feldman was fascinated by the art of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
For many artists in the 20th Century music became the inspiration, and even the model, for experiments in abstraction, where visual equivalents were found for sounds heard in music.
In his work Fugue in Red, Paul Klee is not just the painter he is also the composer. The title of his painting declares the composition to be a fugue (a musical term) in colour, the watercolour being an attempt to represent the movements of shape and colour in their temporal as well as their spatial development. Source: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. You can see other work by Paul Klee at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Related Links.
In 1911 painter Wassily Kandinsky attended a concert performance of music by the young Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg. After the concert Kandinksy created a work, Impression III Concert, preceded by two preparatory sketches. In the first sketch the perspectives of the concert hall, some people and a chandelier can still be seen. In the second sketch the perspectives are no longer apparent. Kandinsky has put in some areas of colour, among them the black piano, the two white columns and a large yellow area on the right-hand side of the picture, but there is only the suggestion of people. Source: Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna. The concert gave Kandinsky the breakthrough he had been waiting for and set him on the path towards abstraction. To see Impression III (Concert) and Kandinsky’s preparatory sketches, look at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Related Links.
The French composer Claude Debussy wrote La Mer (The Sea) between 1903 and 1905 as an impressionistic piece of music. It is not a realistic description of the sea, but instead evokes the colour, movement and suggestion of what the sea is like. Listen here to a short extract from La Mer Debussy was very influenced by the English painter JMW Turner and the French Impressionist painters. La Mer was also influenced by the Japanese artist Hokusai’s (1760 – 1849) woodblock print The Great Wave. Here is a Turner seascape.
The Rothko Chapel was founded in 1971 in Houston, Texas as an intimate sanctuary available to people of every belief. A modern meditative environment, it was inspired by the mural canvasses of American abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko,while Rothko's fellow American, composer Morton Feldman, was commissioned to write a piece of music to be performed in the chapel. Find out more about The Rothko Chapel in Related Links.
Tate Modern in London has a special roomThe Rothko Room, dedicated to a series of Rothko paintings, The Seagram Murals, which were originally intended for a New York restaurant. ‘Mark Rothko saw these paintings as objects of contemplation, demanding the viewer’s complete absorption. Perceived, as the artist intended, in reduced light and in a compact space, the subtlety of the layered surfaces slowly emerges, revealing their solemn and meditative character’. Source: Tate Modern, London. For more information on Rothko and Tate Modern look at Tate Modern in Related Links.
This meditative experience could be considered akin to a listening experience as well as a visual one. As we look at a piece of visual art we also wait to hear and feel the presence of the paintings. We have to listen deeply for our response, those innermost promptings, which are sometimes barely heard at all.
In his painting La Musique, artist Henri Matisse presents five figures against a landscape background executed in very intensive blue and green, but in this world of wondrous torpor the static and isolated figures are engrossed in their music. Source: The Hermitage, St Petersburg
It was the music of Ludwig van Beethoven that changed the way we listened. Rather than a salon with people coming and going and gossiping at the back, concert-goers gathered together in the same room, each wrapped in their own personal world, taken out and away from the world of other people and things by Beethoven’s music.
There is an image of people listening to a Beethoven concert in our Image Gallery.
Music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
Whilst the music lasts.
T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets was inspired by Beethoven’s String Quartet, Opus 132 in A minor. Source: Katie Mitchell, A Meeting of Minds, The Guardian, 2005.
In Connecting to Music we ask children to consider examples of visual art to help them develop a language with which they can then express their responses to complex pieces of classical music. We also provide the children with a toolkit of materials with which they can create their own artwork – a physical expression of what they have heard and felt.
Many children at an early age have negative experiences of making art. This often has to do with a lack of confidence, a feeling that they are not ‘good’ at art, that they can’t draw and so on. They already have a view that art has to be made in a certain way; that it should look like the object they see in front of them.
For many this view kills art and creative desire. In Connecting to Music the imagination of the child is ignited to the possibility of the new by looking at, and trying out, new kinds of visual art. Children are encouraged towards creating abstraction in their artwork, to take them from the known to the unknown and while this is not always comfortable or easy for the child, it can lead them towards new ways of seeing.
’I was very impressed. We can continue to use these demanding tasks in class e.g using music to inspire emotions to create abstract arts. Linking music and art to emotions. Use of music in meditation exercises. Discussion of thoughts/ feelings inspired by music and works of art.’
Primary 7 class teacher, Wardie Primary School, 2007
To make art, to physically work with pieces of paper, pencils, crayons and charcoal etc., gives us the tools to experiment with. To make marks, lines and shapes, to use colour, helps us to make visible the invisible, to express the way in which we uniquely see and experience the world. To wrestle and experiment with the physical nature of making art can profoundly assist in the ability to engage and participate as a listener of music or viewer of paintings, as well as helping to put us in touch with a another layer of our existence.For more information on the artists mentioned look at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Paul Klee Center, Arnold Schoenberg Center and The Rothko Chapel in Related Links.
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