The Etudes
Etude I
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Etude II
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I wanted to begin my new series with acknowledgment of my musical counterpart, Vladimir Kulenovic, conductor and brilliant musician, who opened my eyes to see music – sound – in an insightful way. There is a book by artist David Salle called HOW TO SEE, a series of essays on how to look, talk and think about art. And that is where I began. Thinking, before looking. Listening before painting. Studying the sounds of Clair de Lune or La Mer by Debussy, or an etude by one of Vladimir’s favorite Russian composers, Alexander Scriabin. Scriabin composed tonal idioms, as in painting where tone refers to the relative lightness or darkness of a color – where one color can have an infinite number of different tones.
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My mission was to express the color of sound. So I began with a study, an etude, an instrumental musical composition, not so simple, but of considerable difficulty, usually short, and designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular musical skill. With study, with practice, and a fervent desire to translate the sounds I heard into colors and shapes, my paintings, Etude I and Etude II, became the natural progression of the unfolding of paint on to canvas. In this case, on a double layer of acrylic, that gave it a reflective and infinite quality bouncing off of one another, while a mirror placed on the sides and back guided the colors and shapes into infinity.
Etude 1 (left) & Etude 2 (right), Triple Panel Acrylic on Acrylic with Two Way Mirror, 24” x 28." Click here to inquire about purchasing this piece. |
