
What I am looking at and thinking about related to cubism is the painterly surfaces and the structural strategies of the compositions. I am interested in this idea of passage. Or the spreading out of painting patches that disrupt the solidity of the edges of the forms in the paintings. I think this idea adds a lot of visual dynamics to the images by dematerializing the solidity.
I am looking for the techniques that encourage and enhance the musicality of the compositions. I think my interest in these paintings is the painterly textures that I might be able to exploit for my symphonic style paintings. A lot of my theories have to do with the linier structures of my compositions and the interactions of the linear patterns when they overlay each other as if different instrumentations. For textures some of this can be done with the initial drawing but some could be created with painting strokes.
I think of the linear structure in relation to visual musicality as the actual source of visual sound and the shading and highlighting developed around the lines as the ‘sound’ spreading out from the line creating a sense of space and form, light and shadow. The light and shadow locate the lines in space and can be used to establish emphasis which can allow for visual progression across the surface that can be read by the viewer.
I suppose I developed at lot of these ideas based on a single lesson from my print making teacher Kim Mosley back in the 1970’s when I was a college student many years ago. He took a sheet of paper and put the letters AA and SS meaning active area and silent space. He instructed us to put marks on a paper and feel with our eyes our way from the active area around the mark and see how far it reached before it became silent space. This is probably when I first started thinking about the musicality of the eye, the sound of marks. When does the reach of their reverberations fade into silence?
In the cubist painting experiments, since Picasso and Braque were not going for abstract painting but rather some kind of poetic visual language that was feeding or referring to some kind of narrative outside of the painting itself, referring to various traditional genres such as still life, portraiture or landscape, that required references and motifs to elements outside of the painting such as bottles, trees, buildings, fruit, faces, musical instruments etc. through the invention of signs that represented them. These were then the inspirations and seeming purpose of the paintings – the narrative content.
I think there are signs that the cubists were making clear reference to aspirations toward visual musicality in the paintings by the fact that they often used references to musical subjects such as instruments, sheet music and composers. These references abound in the cubist works. Possibly initially inspired by Braque’s interest in music since he himself played certain instruments like the accordion.



However, I feel that this insistence on signs held them back from fully exploring musicality for its own sake and developing the cubist language purely into an expression of visual music although this idea was soon in circulation especially with Kandinsky’s and Kupka’s speculations among others and later Paul Klee, and others since. There has also been a lot of experimentation with graphic scores but these are intended for performance.
Expressing visual musicality is the thing I have been continuously thinking about over the years. Composing ‘symphonic’ works seems the apex of those ideas. I think cubism has something to teach me in that regard especially when it comes to a rich painterly surface and compositional structure. That is what I am attempting to extract from cubist paintings and basically purge the rest. But it is fun to think about incorporating some of the motifs, at least related to music, in the cubist oeuvre.
I am continuing to work on cubist inspired paintings as a way to explore the idea and see what I can incorporate into my own work.
Below is the current idea of making these kind of paintings.
More about this in a later post.
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