I’ve been asking artists lately—probably for a future essay—to tell me their memories of when they first realized they were going to become artists. The stories thus far have been quite interesting. (If anyone wants to add their own memories, feel free to submit them as a comment on this post.)
As for me, I wrote about an early artist inkling once, several years ago, for an magazine essay on “art and sound”:
I discovered I was going to be an artist when I was all hands and feet, eyes and ears, and learning how to navigate my way through space at age 17. I remember the exact moment: My grandmother was visiting my mother from down the San Bernardino Fwy, and during a pause in the mutual antagonism between the two, my mom mentioned I had recently finished my first painting. “Oh?” said grandma. “Can I see it?” It was a small, high school art class abstract geometric representation of a favorite song (I forget now which one), and of course pretty horrid. But my grandmother’s response to the work was surprising. Instead of saying “that’s nice” and moving on, she looked at the image closely for a long time, then said: “That looks just like Kenneth’s work.”
It turns out that my grandmother was married for a few months in pre-War North Carolina to Kenneth Noland—the superstar minimalist painter of the 1960s. She wasn’t married to him long (she grew tired of his abuse and alcoholic fits), and I am not related to Noland—but even so, this pronouncement carried a lot of weight. So you’ll forgive me when I say that after that day I commenced my “Noland” period—a period which coincided with my “sound, mostly in the form of loud music” period. I can’t count the number of hours I spent during this era in my blacklighted and postered room, sprawled on my stomach, filling my sketchpad with Noland-esque shapes, the sounds of Zeppelin, the Who, the Beatles–whatever—filling the space around me.
This tableau was appropriate–but not so much for the full maudlin middle-American wistfulness of it; rather, because sound and Noland go hand in hand. In fact, sound and art go hand in hand. As James Mcneill Whistler put it, “As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight.” Sir Isaac Newton, who examined the physics of color for his work Opticks, believed that color was an analogous phenomenon to sound in general, and to music in particular. “The Vibrations of the Air,” he wrote of light rays traveling through space, “according to their several bignesses, excite sensations of several sounds.”
And so it has been thought through the centuries into the current era. In a recent article on the jazz saxophonist turned painter Ivo Perelman, critic Eleanor Heartney made numerous comparisons between sound artists (composers and musicians) and the visual arts. “The mysterious affinity of music and art isn’t limited to the realm of metaphor,” she wrote. “Artists on both sides of the divide have frequently crossed the line which separates one side to the other.” She cited musicians like Mussorgsky and Debussy, who attempted to recreate paintings in their music, and contemporary artists like Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Romare Bearden and Stuart Davis who embraced music as a source of inspiration for paintings and sculptures. “Some artists have gone even further,” she continues, “creating sculptures which can be played like instruments, and designing color organs and other devices which mechanically translate sound into color.”…
While my hero Kenneth Noland has not often spoken of his work (except to answer technical questions), one exception to this rule was significant. In regards to his shaped canvases, he said he often creates play between the shape of his canvas and the symmetry of his visual layout, “which opens the depicted forms to the use of color—to sound or harmonize in an expressive way.” Noland was enough of a thinker on sound that he even produced at least one jazz record: “Svengali” in 1973, by Gil Evans. I bought it and listened to it and tried to grok the mystic connection of artistic ideas of sight and sound….
So why are sight and sound so strongly connected in our minds? Seeing and hearing, of course, are the senses that help us navigate through space–and so have a connection to each other. That is, we position ourselves in space simultaneously by seeing the space around us, and by hearing it. (Conversely, the sense of smell, taste, and touch are localized and intimat—constrained usually to a relationship with an object at hand.) To a degree, abstract painting is all about the ways these artists attempt to navigate through the space of a picture-plane. It makes sense that artists would think about and combine our two navigatory senses….
In the end, artists may simply be especially attuned to receive sensory input, and that’s why such thoughts about the abstract nature of sensory perception appears in art throughout this century. My dual interest in sound and seeing as a young man translated in time into a love of art. In a sense, I simply grew into my own body through art and learned to give my senses what they required. As Jackson Pollock once famously said: “The modern artist is expressing an inner world, expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces. The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.”
The Art Brothers 