Dreams

This painting was inspired by Wassily Kandinsky's book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, in which, Kandinsky elucidates his experiences of music and sound as interchangeable. The relationship between music and colour has inspired abstract painters, such as Kandinsky and Klee, throughout history, and today many contemporary painters accredit their talent for colour to their synaesthesia (a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway). 

Absorbing this research, I set out to create a painting to explore this relationship between colour and music. To do so, I employed an intuitive process of painting where I listened to music, closed my eyes, and tried to feel which colour I could hear in the music and how this changed as the music went on. This was a very free and intuitive process that allowed for raw expression and lots of spontaneous mark making. I used multimedia and mixed methods of working, including acrylic, gouache, modelling paste and charcoal on canvas.