i've had another idea (about arty stuff that is)

[Tash]

ok i've had another thought for an artwork, inspired by a painting i saw yesterday where an artist painted a visual image of a piece my astor piazzol, and the whole thoughts that sometimes circulate here to do with colours and notes.
so what i'm thinking is, painting portraits of various composers that i'm very familiar with, using techniques and colours that i think reflect their music, maybe just one certain piece cos that'd make it easier. maybe like beethoven, chopin, debussy, prokofiev, bartok, ross edwards, umm not sure who else. do you think that'd be interesting? and if you have any ideas on how you think any of the composers i mentioned have a specific colour to them then let me know cos it'd be interesting to hear!
another thought to do with colour, how people like me like to associate colours with particular notes, eg. for me F is a kind of dullish blue, A is pink, etc. so same kind of thing as the composers, painting some kind of background that reflects the notes and maybe particular pieces composed in that key, with like a picture of a hand playing that particular note in front of it all. do you think that'd work?

anyway any comments you have on this are as always, most appreciated- the audience is important!!

[asyncopated]

Sounds like a cool idea! Here are some questions --

Are you going to concentrate on their lives or their music? (they are intertwined anyway)

Many of the composeres had very interesting lives... Mozart for example was always broke and almost got thrown out by his landlord several times.

Each of them had a favorite key and many childeren.

I suppose another approach is your impression of composers.  What does their music evoke.

To only thing that is negative(?) so far is that I think your subject range is too broad-- you need throw around and solidify ideas before starting on the project.

[JamesS]

This sounds quite similar to the ideas that I started getting interested in when I was doing A-level art. The link between art and music is a very strong idea and as my work progressed I became more interested with the idea of representing specific pieces of music in artwork, in fact my final exam piece was a large visual representation of The Rite of Spring, an ideal piece of music for creating exciting and energetic artwork. To take this a step further I have often like the idea of representing musical structure in artwork, for example sonata form, where different visual themes get developed and recapitulated.

Your ideas are very interesting, especially the colour/note relations. Scriabin actually used an instrument, I forget the name, that projected different colours for different notes. I think that there are maybe two things that you could consider further. First of all how abstract is this going to end up being, for me personally I found that my work gets more and more abstract the more I try and relate it to music, this is possibly because music is purely abstract. Secondly how complex are the images going to be, for example the portrait of composers, is this going to be a traditional portrait composition? I think the idea is a very good one, maybe just base it on a single work that you feel close to, if you then find that that work evokes certain colours in you then you could make those colours dominant in your image. I like the idea a lot because not only does it say something about the composer and their music but also about you and your reaction to the muisc.

J.

[pianonut]

yes...going along with this idea, when you display, you could have a button that lets the viewer listen to the piece while they look at the painting.

[Tash]

nice responses. just answering a few of those questions, i'd like to focus more on their music than their lives- picking a particular piece would probably be my best way to go, because like asyncopated said, it's very broad so i need to specify it. so if i focus on one piece that's fairly significant for the composer and their fave key, then i can associate colour with the key.
with the portraits, i was thinking my technique for how traditional or abstract would reflect their style of music, so say if i did mozart then i'd make it very neat and realistic, but prokofiev would probably be more bizarre and lively, whilst debussy i could adopt a more impressionistic technique.
i know there's like 5 million artists out there who have done similar things, depicting music and all, but the chances that any of them are in my art class is highly unlikely and i just want to stand out from everyone else and portraiture is a good way to go judging what everyone has created so far!
but hey i have 5 weeks to think about it. i might even change my mind and go oh let's do something to do with maths and science. cos that'd be cool too...agh too many options!