Articles Archives - Abstracted Reality

The French Connection – Monet and Debussy

As part of my ‘In Harmony’ series of blog posts, I want to explore linking an artwork (whether it be a painting or photograph) with a specific piece of music. My goal is to have both the art piece and composition amplify and strengthen the emotions and feelings intrinsic to both works.

In essence, I’m adding a visual connection or stimulus to a piece of music (or vice versa, an aural stimulus to a piece of art). It’s a technique I use a lot with my students. Sometimes a composer will give the performer a helping hand with an evocative title like ‘Lavender Fields’ where it’s not difficult to imagine swathes of purple flowers undulating gently in the golden glow of a Summer sunset. With more generic titles, my students and I have to get a little more creative.

I’ve had this collection of Debussy’s piano pieces for many, many years and couldn’t count how many times I’ve opened it, or how many pieces I’ve chosen for my piano students from it.

I’ve always had more than a passing interest in the painting on the cover, but have never really taken the time to investigate fully – until now.

Monet’s ‘Impression, Sunrise’

‘Impression, Sunrise’ by Claude Monet

Painted in the early 1870s, Monet’s ‘Impression, Sunrise’ depicts a view of the port of Le Havre in north-western France. Two individuals can be seen in the rowboat in the foreground, while in the background, larger ships and boats inhabit the harbour. Cranes, other heavy machinery and factory chimneys complete the scene. Most notably, the sun shines a vibrant orange, cutting through the haze and industrial smoke.

Claude Monet (self-portrait) 1840 – 1926

Monet portrays a supremely calm scene with the misty, foggy atmosphere enveloping the harbour. We feel present, active observers, yet there’s a vagueness, an indistinctness which seductively draws us into the picture and heightens our curiosity.

‘Impression, Sunrise’ has been hailed as one of the cornerstones of the Impressionist Movement. Rather than painting an exact likeness or strict representation, the Impressionists endeavoured to convey their perceptions of a scene, often playing with light, employing vague outlines, and utilising subtle colours.

Impressionism in the visual arts soon blossomed into a similar style and aesthetic in music.

Claude Debussy 1862 – 1918

Impressionist composers focused on conveying mood and atmosphere.

Claude Debussy is viewed as one of the central exponents of Impressionist music (though he himself disliked the title of an Impressionist composer). Translating into sound the nuanced and subtle colourations of his visual counterparts, Debussy’s music embodies the same dreamlike and ephemeral qualities.

Often defying traditional harmonic conventions, Debussy employed exotic scales (whole-tone and pentatonic), ambiguous tonality, unresolved chords and inventive orchestration to compose his works.

The French Connection

So, returning to my goal of connecting a particular piece of music with a particular piece of art, the cover of my Debussy collection has given me the perfect inspiration and incentive to form my ‘French Connection’.

Debussy composed many remarkable and beautiful works, and narrowing down the field to just a single piece has been difficult. However, one did stand out.

‘Voiles’ is a piece for solo piano from 1909, and the second piece in a set of twelve preludes published a year later.

The opening bars of ‘Voiles’ by Debussy

Translated into English as either ‘veils’ or ‘sails’, I think both meanings work equally well. I can imagine being one of the occupants in the rowboat, languidly drifting on the calm water, watching the sail boats in the distance and taking in the whole atmosphere of the port as it stirs and awakens to begin a new day.

Everything has a mystical, ethereal quality. Shrouded in a foggy haze, it’s as if we’re observing the scene through a veil, as if our eyes aren’t fully focused yet as we arise from our slumber. Even the sun cannot fully penetrate, but only cast a suggestive, orange glow on the rippling water.

‘Voiles’ almost exclusively uses the whole tone scale, and with this unusual ‘soundscape’, Debussy creates a feeling of mystery, stillness and tranquility. We feel as if we’re floating on a wash of sound, carried effortlessly along on the water in an almost hypnotic trance.

A low repeating bass note also punctuates the texture, perhaps the beating ‘throb’ of the port as the workers bring its factories and industries back into life for a new day.

Take some time to listen and look

Anna Tsybuleva performing ‘Voiles’ by Debussy

Anna Tsybuleva gives a wonderfully sensitive and evocative performance of this piece.

So, take 4 minutes out of your schedule to be transported to the port of Le Havre. Let Monet’s painting and Debussy’s music carry you into another world, just for a little while…

‘Impression, Sunrise’ by Claude Monet

Jane Trotter - Creator of Abstracted Reality

Jane Trotter is an abstract photographer living in Dunedin, New Zealand. Reimagining everyday objects found around the home, Jane transforms them into colourful and dramatic pieces of contemporary art. Her Fine Art Prints are available in sizes A4 to A1.

Exposed #20: Follow the Yellow Brick Road

Spoiler Alert! In my 'Exposed' series of articles I reveal some of the secrets behind how I created my images. If you don't want to know how I made 'Follow the Yellow Brick Road' stop reading now!

I must confess, I’m a sucker when it comes to colourful patterns. I think I’m attracted to the challenge of creating order and coherency out of what could be disarray and mayhem. Perhaps that makes me a bit of a control freak, but frankly, when it comes to my photography, I think I probably am!

You can’t really get more orderly than ‘Follow the Yellow Brick Road’ – three panels, all the same, three primary colours, all aligning.

Original source image for ‘Follow the Yellow Brick Road’

It started out very simply with three folded pieces of paper. I remember the sun was streaming in through a window in my piano studio and there was a patch of bright sunlight on the carpet. I arranged the pieces of paper on the floor so there was an interplay of shadows, but also, so there were plenty of opposing angles with the folds.

After cropping out the unnecessary and distracting edges, and enhancing the colours, I was left with “what next?” As an image by itself, it was interesting enough, but I felt a lot more could be accomplished with some creative playing.

Changing the orientation made all the difference. I could start to see the potential for a pathway leading upwards. They yellow paper really stood out and provided the inspiration for the title.

A couple of years went by, and, for some reason which I’ve long forgotten, I went back into the ‘Follow the Yellow Brick Road’ folder on my computer. I decided to try out some different crops and, simplifying the elements even further, chose a very restricted format containing just two colours.

Deciding I liked the blue and yellow selection better, I set about the same process of flipping and rotating the three images until I came up with something I liked.

‘Paper Stairway’ was the result. Interestingly, one of my friends pointed out that you can only move up and down the blue stairs.

As it turns out, there was yet more to discover with these little two-colour crops – the base image for ‘Yellow Brick’ just kept on giving! Preparing to write this blog post saw me delve into ‘Yellow Brick’s’ folder again and I was reacquainted with my mini selections.

Now I was really determined to push the boat out – I decided to challenge myself and create a larger multi-panel piece which would include both the blue and yellow, and the green and yellow images. With reckless ambition and a rush of blood to the head, I was determined to have nine panels – an enneaptych (and yes, I did have to look that up!)

After much playing about, which I actually really do enjoy, I created ‘Ascension Blue’.

Like ‘Paper Stairway’, these Escher-inspired stairs also coalesce around the blue steps in the middle panels.

Humble pieces of paper have proved to be fertile ground for my triptychs. If you’d like to explore further and see a variety of ‘paper’ triptychs please check out:

‘Cascade’

‘Back in the Fold’

‘Mystique’ and ‘Astral Plane’

“Music is the ultimate teacher” Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky (1866 – 1944) is generally credited as the pioneer of Abstract Art. For this visionary and influential painter and art theorist, colour and music shared an inseparable and profound bond.

Kandinsky recounts an extraordinary visual reaction he experienced while attending a performance of Wagner’s opera ‘Lohengrin’ – “I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me”.

In fact, the influence of music inhabits most of Kandinsky’s artwork. In his ground-breaking 1912 Treatise ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’, Kandinsky espouses the deep interconnectedness of colour, shape, form, music, art, spirituality and the soul.

Impressions, Improvisations and Compositions

Exploring the connection between art and music even further, Kandinsky went so far as to give generic titles to his abstract paintings based on musical terminology. ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ outlines his three basic classifications:

Impressions – “A direct impression of outward nature, expressed in purely artistic form”

Impression ‘Autumn’ 1908

Improvisations – “A largely unconscious, spontaneous expression in inner character, the non-material nature”

Improvisation ‘Deluge’ 1913

Improvisation ‘Dreamy’ 1913

Compositions – “An expression of a slowly formed inner feeling, which comes to utterance only after long maturing. In this, reason, consciousness, purpose, play an overwhelming part. But of the calculation nothing appears, only the feeling”

Composition VIII 1926

Composition IV 1911

Kandinsky painted a collection of 10 ‘Compositions’ between 1907 and 1939. Unfortunately, the first three of these large-scale works were destroyed in the second world war, but from what remains of sketches and photographs at the time, art historians can piece together the concept of an overarching sequence of paintings which were intended to be the musical equivalent of a cycle of ‘Symphonies’.

The ‘Improvisations’ have variously been described as less immense, more dramatic – perhaps more akin to a ‘Concerto’.

While the ‘Impressions’ may have a less musical title, several of them were apparently specifically written in response to hearing particular pieces of music.

Impression III ‘Concert’ 1911

Perhaps this painting was inspired by a concert Kandinsky attended? When I look at the work, I can easily image the hustle and bustle of concert-goers filing into a large auditorium, the vibrant colours giving a sense of urgency and anticipation. Maybe it’s because I play the piano, but to me, the large, black, almost triangular shaped block of colour suggests the lid of a grand piano.

Synesthesia

Kandinsky’s extraordinary ability to simultaneously experience music and colour so vividly (which he described at the opera performance) comes from the neurological phenomenon called synesthesia.

Kandinsky with one of his large-scale works

From the Greek syn meaning ‘join’ and aesthesis meaning ‘perception’, individuals experiencing synesthesia will have one sensory input involuntarily stimulate a second sensory pathway. For example, when someone hears a cat meow, they may experience the taste of an apple. In Kandinsky’s case, he saw colours when he heard music, and experienced sound when he painted.

Composition VII 1913

Michael T. H. Sadler, the translator of Kandinsky’s ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’, states in his introduction to the book, “Kandinsky is painting music. That is to say, he has broken down the barrier between music and painting, and has isolated the pure emotion which, for want of a better name, we call the artistic emotion.”

A Personal Note

The more I’ve investigated Kandinsky’s paintings, the more I’ve come to like them, even though many appear challenging and sometimes difficult to understand. But perhaps that’s the point. The less you try to ‘understand’ and ‘rationalise’, the more you ‘see’; not from a representational or pictorial viewpoint, but ‘instinctively’ and ’emotionally’.

Embracing the endless interplay of colours, tracing the developing shapes and patterns and absorbing the entire canvas as one dynamic entity is incredibly rewarding.

Out of all of Kandinsky’s works, I would have to say, this is probably my favourite, ‘Yellow – Red – Blue’ painted in 1925.