Painting and Bach

Painting and Bach 

 

When  painting in the studio I have always  listened to music. For me, the essentials  for a working studio environment are: good lighting, lots of wall space and a sound system to play music on.  Not every artist wants  to listen to music while they work. One painter I know wants to hear the repeated sound of his brush as it scrapes against the canvas. It  helps reminds him that painting  is an both an action and reaction between the painters ideas and the paint. I like solitude in the studio at times but more often than not I want the effect music has on me while I’m painting.  Playing good music while I work is more than just background entertainment;  it seems directly connected to my painting process.  Music is, as the Greeks defined it, a muse. I welcome the Greek Goddesses of  the arts, music, poetry, dance.  I’ll summoned the help anywhere I can.   

Moments of inspiration, the sound of the muse, can happen in a particular piece of music or just one phrase of a song.  The muse I want to hear when I am painting  is a spark, an aesthetic epiphany of sorts.  The ah-ha moment where things seem clear and boundless at the same time. It becomes the moment when you in a sense step out of your own way, side stepping your immediate plans or ideas to allow something else to happen; something better than you might have ever planned to do on your own. This is, maybe stated in overly simple terms, the creative moment. And sometimes music can initiate that moment.

For a long time  the collection of things I would play in my studio seemed quite eclectic. The jazz riffs of John Coltrane, a British band called Elbow, the African rhythms of Ali Farka Toure, Mahalia Jackson’s gospel singing and spoken word pieces by Charles Mingus. On one hand all these styles seemed  disassociated from each other  but they  also seemed  in a  way related. There were some pieces I played once in a while when I might need a particular lift and then there were whole compact discs or portions of  discs that I played over and over while painting. They all did something that I liked, something that inspired, but it wasn’t until I fell in love with the music of J.S.Bach that I  thought I might understand how they inspired.

Bach wrote most of his music in the contrapuntal style of the time. Contrapuntal music is written with two or more independent voices that interweave together building upon each other. He took  these voices and note structures and  wrote, in his lifetime, over 1200 completed works.  As an artist what intrigues me about Bach  was that he wrote  all  his music for one particular purpose. He wrote  so the people who played the work, or sang the pieces, or listened to them felt the presence of God. He believed that the work itself could have that effect. This was a  faithful notion that even by the end of his life was becoming old fashioned. Music was to become more harmonic and purely entertaining in the coming Age of Enlightenment. But I can still feel a sense of his purpose in the music he wrote.  Bach joins a long lineage of musicians that seem to be driven by intentions. They  want to affect people in a particular way.  Native people played rhythms on drums, Bach wrote fugues, Whirling Dervishes spun in circles, and  Jimmie Hendrix played his guitar. The vehicle by which you can feel this musical pulse, can be diverse and  varied.  Most people know ‘it’ when they hear it, or more precisely, when they feel it. 

  James Joyce defined good art as that which turns your ‘attention outward’ from yourself.  Good music does the same, drawing your focus to something larger than you. That is what Bach was doing. I’m not suggesting  we follow Bachs religious beliefs. I’m suggesting  we listen to  his larger picture, his muse.  And when one can listen to the larger picture, new ideas and new ways of approaching a painting can happen. I want that to take place when I’m painting.

I came to love Bach, as may have through the  piano playing of Glenn Gould.  Gould, the musician and the man, seemed to embodied everything that I find exciting in the arts.  A fresh outlook with a nod to the past, a life dedicated to the purpose of art, and complete originality. For me it was Glenn Gould, who played Bach like no one before him, that open the door to classical music and what Bach was trying to do.   Gould took all his influences and upbringing, and created something completely unique with his interpretation. The piano playing of Glenn Gould took the world be storm precisely because so many could feel what he was doing was special.  Gould was the first Canadian pianist to play a concert tour in Russia. He was 24 years old. The  first  recital on the tour was  performed in St. Petersburg  and was more than half empty. Partly because people in the Soviet Union at that time just didn’t listen to Bach. It was hardly ever played. At the intermission people in attendance ran to call friends and relatives to drop what ever they were doing and to come down to join them because something very special was happening. By the time the second half  of the concert commenced people were lined up on the streets pressing to get in. They were pressing in to hear Glen Gould play  Bach. They  were pressing in to hear the creative sound of the Muse.

Painting like performing music, is an action. It is a process, an event. A painter takes a whole bunch of parts,  works them together in some type of alchemy and  hopefully creates something of beauty. Those parts consist of ideas, influences, historical references,  paints and painting tools. All these things need to come together and fit correctly. There are a plethora of combinations in the way these aspects can fit together, which account for different styles and tastes in art. But even with all these different approaches each painting needs to be constructed so that it works. The parts need to fit, to be whole, just as Bachs contrapuntal voices needed to fit. As a painter to see or hear another artist put their distinctive ideas together beautifully is inspirational. It fuels oneself. It is the beatific image of the creative Muse herself. 

 

Richard Kooyman

January 2008