I Think I See a Horse

My mother told me that when you listen to music, and shut your eyes you see the music. When you listen to music you picture it in your head, a song with lyrics unfolds like a movie inside your head, you see lucy in the sky wearing diamonds and you’re able to picture a stairway to heaven. Even plain and pure music can inspire images in your head, Beethovens’ Pastoral, Vivaldis’ Four seasons are literally named after the images the music evokes. Sometimes while listening to plain music you just imagine abstract shapes, and colours, Fantasia the classic Disney movie played on this concept by literally painting and animating western classical music – sometimes as a story (the extinction of dinosaurs, Greek Mythology) sometimes as just patterns and shapes(rolling purple hills turn into green lines which become yellow waves) the dancing mushrooms and hippopotamus ballerinas defy description but I assume they fall in between the two categories above. Music videos – do the same the same – they paint the song.
Music and art have been interlinked for me since the day my mother introduced me to Fantasia and explained the visual power of music. And just like you use art to understand music, you can use music to understand art.
Art is just like music, when you look at art and open your ears, you ought to hear music. Look at a painting of a girl sitting by a piano that’s music with lyrics, look at abstract art it’s like an instrumental piece of music. No one questions that instrumental music brings pleasure, no one complains that they don’t “get” instrumental music. Well, it’s just the same with an abstract painting, what instrumental music is to the ears, abstract painting is to your eyes. A truly wonderful piece of art can inspire music in your head. And just like a piece of instrumental music can sometimes be a story or sometimes just shapes in your head, similarly an abstract painting can sometimes be interpreted and sometimes just appreciated for what it is – a pleasure to behold. Treat art like music and you’ll open a whole new world. Open your eyes, look at the painting, do you like it? Does it make you feel good, happy, sad, excited, dulled? You don’t need to know technique or the interpretation of art, just know what you feel and slowly you’ll pick up the rest. Perhaps Kandinsky my favourite painter shared this theory with me- he named his masterpieces in abstract work after musical terms, he called them compositions.