Moved by the music...again

I am consistently amazed by the effect that music has on me. Out for a run listening to a music, running at one pace, the right song comes up on the playlist and the seconds are immediately dropping off my pace. While I knew how it worked on me with exercise, I had no idea how it would affect my painting.

I've already posted about the one-shot piece I achieved in half an hour of listening to the Young Tradition medley I scrolled across in Facebook. And within a fortnight, it happened again. There was a canvas that started its life as a testing ground. Any new marks I wanted to play with, new hues of paint or colour combinations I wanted to try went onto this canvas. It quickly looked as though a clown had sneezed technicolour goo onto it. I was so embarrassed by the mess that was evolving that I hid it behind other canvases in my glass-walled studio so that no one would think it was a serious piece of work.

My intention was that after this random start, I would eventually start to work it into a more serious piece. The colours were so vivid, however, that it continually looked like a child had sneaked in with their school paints and had at it in the night. In an effort to mute this rainbow cacophony, I mixed up muted earth tones and sought to subdue the lot. It went from being the loudest, brightest piece I had ever made, to one of the dullest. Over the weeks, each time I touched it took it from bad to bad in another way.

With plans to give it one more day and then gesso over it, I sat staring at the dull and lifeless work. The day was almost over and I had no idea what it needed apart from total obviation. For the second time in a two week period, enter Facebook and a Zoom video of child performers taking a song that I liked and making it exceptional. Remembering my previous experience, and feeling that I now had nothing to lose as I'd be covering over it anyway, I put earbuds in, switched off thought and attacked the canvas with nothing but intuition and an emotional response to the music.

And that was all it took. Contrasts came out, balance was found, annoying earlier shapes disappeared while the subtler mixes of hues within them were maintained and new subtleties appeared. Areas with too much of one colour disappeared under new layers that I may have otherwise agonised for hours over, but in this case, came out of the brush easily. Within an hour, the voice that told me to leave it now had absolute certainty.

The resemblance to earth from space that occurs to me when I look at the finished painting is not intentional, but seems apt to me as it was the One Voice Children's Choir that helped to bring it all together, their young voices reminding me in these troubled times that when you see the Earth from space, all artificial boundaries disappear and all we are left with is a beautiful blue, green and brown orb, wrapped in feathers of white cloud.