Sunday Morning Bliss (2019, oil on canvas)

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."
-Tao de Ching

I studied and played music for many years, before an overuse injury forced me to relinquish my musical aspirations almost 22 years ago. It was devastating blow to my psyche at the time. I had chosen to abandon my graduate studies in fine art so I could focus on music, foregoing any alternate career path in favor of devoting long hours to study, practice, rehearsal and performance, as well as all of the marketing-related duties associated with leading a musical group. Suddenly finding myself unable to even hold a guitar pick left me feeling aimless and dejected, at least until my innate tenacity forced me to re-enroll in art school and begin painting again, ultimately leading me back to my first (and true) love. Occasionally, we might find ourselves astray in a rugged and impenetrable wilderness, thinking that we have irrevocably lost our path, only to one day stumble upon our destination and the realization that whatever trials and tribulations we had suffered while seemingly lost, were necessary rites of passage.

The study of music taught me a great deal about visual art and I constantly find myself thinking about the parallels between the two forms. Value (lights and darks) is like rhythm in music. Areas of strong value contrast are like staccato passages in music, with pronounced beats surrounded by bits of silence. Conversely, areas in a painting and drawing with little or now value contrast are like legato passages in music, where the notes transition smoothly one into the next with no space between.

One of the biggest similarities between music and art is the correlation between pitch and color. Interestingly, the color theory that my approach is based on uses a 12 step color wheel composed of three primaries (yellow, red, blue), three secondaries made by combining the primaries (orange, green, violet) and the intermediate colors between each primary and secondary (red-orange, yellow-green, etc.) arranged so that the complimentary colors are opposite one another. Western music is composed of 12 pitches and the associated keys are often diagramed in a circle (the Circle of 5ths) with contrasting keys (the ones with the fewest notes in common and, hence, the most dissonance when played together) opposite each other. I organize my paintings using color tonalities in a way that is very similar to how a composer organizes a piece of music around specific tonalities. The ultimate goal in both cases is harmony.

Sometimes these color tonalities are fairly simple. Like a tune written exclusively with the notes in the C-major scale, I might create an image based entirely on variations of the color green. More often, though, I like more complex tonalities, like a piece of music that modulates through several keys. I rarely think this way while actually working, but years of practice (and a multitude of failures!) have developed my ability to organize and harmonize the colors intuitively in my attempt to transform my content into visual form.

This painting is based, essentially, on the analogous cool colors: ranging from red-violet to violet to blue-violet to blue and blue-green – colors which all contain some measure of blue, the coolest color. This helps give the painting its overall cool feeling, but there are also quite few warmer colors including yellow, yellow-green and orange which, having been weakened by the addition of white (what we artists refer to as "tinting"), provide just enough contrasts to actually make the cool colors seem even cooler than if they were the only colors in the painting. This is common practice amongst music composers as well, who will insert a "sad" minor chord into an overall "happy" major key-based piece, the resulting contrast making the happier sounding chords seem even happier.

I find this approach very helpful in my work and I don't think I could have developed the ability to think this way about color had I not spent years away from painting, with my attention focused on the study of music. The older I get, the more I realize how important it is to have faith that our lives will unfold exactly the way they are meant to. How could it be otherwise?