Visual Tone Poems: Landscape Art Inspired by Classical Music

by | Aug 24, 2016 | Art & Classical Music

The color of music.

Painting has color. So does classical music. All my adult life I have intensely enjoyed the many connections of tonal quality between the two art forms. Read on, and see if you feel the same.

Both arts radiate tonal color, and certain styles of expression within each art form accentuate color as the dominant characteristic of the work. Some abstract paintings for example, are built around color itself. It’s literally what they are all about. Form is present just enough to articulate large swaths of rich hues, without being deliberately descriptive of anything in the real world. Color rules.

Classical music can be every bit as rich, but the colorful tones tend to conjure up imagery, oddly enough. Tonal color in orchestral music can be just as expressive as different hues and shades in painting. They are painterly, but in a musical sense. And probably the most painterly of all musical forms is the tone poem.

The tone poem: evoking the feeling of landscape

According to Wikipedia, a tone poem in classical music usually refers to a piece of orchestral music, most of the time in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, or landscape.

As a landscape artist, the “tone” reference is of particular interest to me. It opens up the audio space to such an extent that it invokes real 3 dimensional space in my imagination and senses. And I love to carry that feeling through all of my artwork.

Often, if a piece of music has certain characteristics, the space it invokes is the feeling of a landscape, whether intimate or grandiose. Landscape forms share so many similarities of structure with classical music, particularly symphonic pieces: peaks, valleys, abrupt cliffs and gentle slopes all feature in the topology of music.

Contours and textures

Listening to certain pieces of music I get a real sense not only of contour, but of texture and atmosphere and even altitude as well.

What about you? Do certain pieces of music lift you right out of your chair and carry you off into nature? What pieces transport you to the hills, to the mountains, to the sea? Feel free to comment on my Facebook page.

Here are a few personal selections of music that inspire the feeling of landscape within me.

Music that inspires the sense of landscape: a few personal picks:

Beethoven Symphony #7

First up is the Beethoven symphony that gave me my epiphany of awareness around the age of 25 while on a road trip through the Adirondack mountains around Lake Placid, New York: Symphony #7. The first movement sostenuto, with its expansive chords, immediately evokes for me glimpses of the grand scale and lush green textures of towering mountains, seen through gaps in the trees while driving through the valley roads. And the second movement, the allegretto, never fails to lift me up, higher and higher, through patches of fragrant mist, up the climb to the peak of Mount Washington. A breathtaking experience, magically conjured up through music.

Beethoven Symphony #6, the Pastoral

Probably the most famous, the rolling hills of Beethoven’s 6th symphony, the “pastoral” is one piece that almost anyone who hears it acknowledges as a landscape for the ears. Yes, it is actually titled as such: Beethoven’s full title was “Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life.” So sure, we’re predisposed to consider it as the musical impression of a landscape, but Beethoven the landscape artist created such a masterpiece of natural musical forms, rhythms and contours that the connection totally rings true.

Peer Gynt Suite, Edvard Grieg

Another famous piece that invokes the feel of a romantic vision of nature is “Morning Mood”, first movement of the Peer Gynt Suite #1 by Edvard Grieg. The title still somewhat hints at an outdoor scene but even if it were untitled, there’s no doubt that it would conjure up a beautiful landscape in one’s imagination.

My video piece above explores the connections between the landscape forms in one of my works entitled “Prairie Symphony #1” and Grieg’s Morning Mood. My intent was to use simply a virtual camera, and one piece of art… pan and zoom, and fade, and nothing else. As an animator I have plenty of concepts for more complex explorations. Stay tuned, subscribe to my personal announcement email list for developments.

Please give it a like on Facebook and share it if it resonates with you.

A piece of music certainly doesn’t need to be deliberately titled to be evocative of the spirit of landscape, though….

Gabriel Faure, Sicilienne

Conjuring some of the more intimate impressions of landscape are the Sicilienne by Gabriel Faurē. That one always opens up a glimpse into a quiet woodland valley full of dark green foliage and cool, filtered light on the forest floor.

Apres Midi d’un Faun, Claude Debussy

Another is the Afternoon of a Faun by Claude Debussy. It’s more of a shifting view that seems to expand and contract with the ebb and flow of shimmering intensity within the music. A broader view opens to sunlight, then meanders through 3 dimensional layers of colorful shade, then turns to explore another half hidden intrigue of the forest. It’s easily one of the most evocative pieces in all of music. A true force of nature. As colorful as a painting.

Mendelssohn’s Scotland: The Hebrides and the Scottish Symphony

At the other extreme, several symphonic pieces by Mendelssohn open up grand romantic vistas of misty Scottish highlands and the craggy coastlines of England, with the Scottish Symphony and the Hebrides Overture.

The Hebrides is a great example of exactly how classical music can conjure up pictures and atmospheric scenes out of lines of musical notes.

What seems to create a landscape vision are in particular a series of rising scales and passages that seem to layer and build, one on top of the other, like an eagle soaring up the heights of a coastal mountain, from surf to rocks to slope to cliffs to peak to clouds. Darkly dramatic and deeply spatial.

 

 

La Mer, Debussy: perhaps the Ultimate soundscape?

Impressionism is perhaps the pinnacle of the musical expression of place. Another piece from Debussy, “La Mer” is arguably the supreme masterpiece of landscape art in all of classical music. Ethereal, atmospheric harmonies, so vivid you can almost smell the seacoast, rhythmic passages that suggest powerful surf and spray upon rocks, and a grand scale, whirling ebb and flow genuinely capture the imagination – the visual imagination – and hold it spellbound by the majesty of the sea.

Soundscapes like these radiate tonal color that truly paint pictures in the mind.

In my own art my aim is to traverse that heady connection between the spatial qualities of classical music and landscape art. Look through my work and see if you can sense it.

Do you have a favorite piece of music that always conjures up the feeling of landscape? Please share it with me in the comments section below. I hope to influence a few orchestras and musicians to feature this theme in their program selections. Your comments will help move this along. Thanks!

Let me know what your own favorite pieces of “musical landscape” are on Twitter and Facebook!

Hallucinatory Color in Landscape Art

by | Aug 24, 2016 | Form & Color

The evolution of color in landscape art.

Color in landscape art has evolved from naturalistic tones deriving from the earth itself, into a completely unrestrained range of expressive color.

It came a long way to get to this point, and it has been one beautiful transformation after another. This article is my magical mystery tour through color in landscape art. I must tell you upfront, I have cherry-picked examples of representative artists throughout, and my take on this subject is hardly the last word, nor is it thesis material for a PHD.

If you’re an art history buff, you undoubtedly have some favorite examples I didn’t touch on. You’re cordially invited to enthuse about your own examples on Facebook. As always, be nice; enthusiasm makes the world go round.

The first examples of pure landscape art

The landscape genre in art, (that is, works of art featuring landscape exclusively as a subject matter), began in ancient times. The first examples of art featuring just landscape, without other subject matter in them, were Minoan frescos from about 1500 BC.

The Greeks and Romans created wall paintings depicting purely landscape and garden-scape scenes. My wife and I had the chance to tour the ruins of Pompeii in 2008, and there you can see that landscape art was used mostly to extend the ambiance of walled gardens.

The colors in those works were mostly natural earth pigments mixed into the wet plaster fresco, with some blue shades for skies deriving from lapis lazuli, I believe.

But mainly palettes were muted, and saturation was tethered to the origins of the pigments they used.

Landscape watercolors of the orient

In China, the Yuan and later the Ming dynasty landscape painters worked in watercolor and ink. Palettes were earthen, but unlike much western art, line plays a dynamic role. Focal points within oriental landscape painting come to life in an almost animated way. Rhythm of pattern is way more vigorous than just about anything in pure landscape art of the west. Dynamic range was incredible, but color was limited.

The Netherlands in the 1500’s was one of the first places where landscape painting became a popular subject for painting, and where it began to build a permanent legitimacy as subject matter unto itself, rather than existing just as background material in a scene.

Classical landscape painters: restrained, naturalistic color

The classical landscape painters of the 17th century academies, like Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin featured more interesting light effects, so light vs. dark began to build in range but still color was restrained, soft, and subdued in their paintings.

Even in the mid 18th century color was still naturalistic and saturation of color tones were limited, and in fact further delimited by the imperative of historical accuracy in landscape painting, as practised by Valenciennes and Corot.

Turner and the Impressionists: color begins to decouple from earth tones

The art of JMW Turner advanced light and texture and loosened up overall form in landscape but color not so much.

Then came the impressionists, and color in landscape art began to decouple from the earth-derived tones that limited it for centuries.

We began to see flecks and dabs of primary colors infused into the shimmering, atmospheric scenes where land and sky and sea could become more and more ambiguous. There was a loosening and more separation of color from the strict physical appearance of the scenes depicted.

The spirit of the scene emerges

Monet took color in landscape to a bolder and more independent stature and prominence: flourishes of color started to become expressive components of the underlying feeling and spirit of the scene, as distinct from its natural appearance. His water lilies show passages of pure expressionist color. Color use that makes sense within the logic of a painting, not necessarily making a naturalistic statement.

Color takes on a central role

Seurat’s pointillism advanced the role of color in landscape art even further, exploiting color’s ability to combine into vibrant, scintillating energy way beyond what a flat tone could produce. His use of color was much more carefully calculated, yet still achieved a higher role in the total impact of a painting.

Van Gogh took color into a more personal, expressive mode. His paintings settled once and for all the idea that color itself could feature as an autonomous expression. His art opened up a vast new field of expression with its idiosyncratic, bold coloration.

Color really begins to come across as a living spirit of the thing it depicts.

Modulated and fragmented color hallucinations

Cezanne modulated color in conjunction with broad strokes to achieve a breakthrough in landscape art. The separate stokes tend to take on an identity of their own.

Picasso and the cubists took this idea to extremes, breaking with physically observed form and exploding the various planes of light and shade into analytical, almost crystalline interpretations.

Truly hallucinatory effects were produced.

And speaking of hallucinations, the work of Paul Gauguin may have actually been inspired by a substance or two. Some of his late landscapes are masterpieces of vibrant color.

Wildly expressive color dominates

Picasso progressed beyond the intellectualized style of cubism, loosening up the rigidity of expression, and becoming wildly expressive, both with form, line, and color.

Matisse and the Fauvist painters amped up color to a point where it actually took over the main impact of a landscape painting, with bold, and importantly, very broad swaths and gestures of intense hues. This intensity of hue and looseness of form give Fauvist works a fantasy-like appearance.

The color in a landscape now became the dominant thing!

The spiritual dimension of color in landscape art

Canadian landscape artist Lawren Harris took color into an almost spiritual dimension with his bold, iconic compositions of Canada’s north. The group of seven painters each brought their individual approach to color in landscape with bold strokes.

Georgia O’Keefe brought a dramatic color palette to landscape art, and magnified the most colorful natural element in the landscape – flowers – into the entire subject matter of many of her paintings.

Color takes on a life of its own

Color later began to take on a life of its own, even while it still retained some atmospheric references to landscape. Abstract expressionist artists like Helen Frankenthaler took broad, loose swaths of color beyond any conventional depiction of landscape into a world unto themselves, floating on dreamy fields of color, while still referencing the feel of landscape.

Jules Olitski drew out the fullest atmospheric potential of a single hue in his paintings, using a spray gun.

Abstract artists like Paul Jenkins took intensely saturated liquid paint and allowed the liquid physical characteristics of the paint to dictate form in a totally organic way. And yet, despite no pre-conceived idea of horizon or even gravity, his works still hold the essence of landscape.

Color field painting meets landscape

Landscape artists like Wolf Kahn have steered color field painting into the forms of landscape, building up large areas of color articulated by a loose framework of natural detail as grace notes.

Recent years have seen artists take the expressive power of color into entirely new dimensions in the art of landscape.

Freedom and expressive power in color

Artists like Gerhard Richter take pure hues and infuse them into several abstract styles of art, from geometric stripes suggestive of horizontal fields and the motion of a speeding car or airplane, to painterly vertical swaths of color that bring to mind sunlit trees in the forest.

My own landscape art makes much of that freedom of color to express a spirit and energy that can seem hallucinatory and dreamlike.

 

 

Contrapuntal rhythms of color in landscape art

I like to push color to its limits, and introduce hits of high intensity hues that serve to energize my work. I take inspiration from classical music in its contrapuntal rhythms, to articulate bold color forms.

And I like to channel the spontaneity and the broad fields of color from abstract expressionist painters into works of landscape art that resonate with that hallucinatory feeling of bold color.

 

You Passed a Stunning Landscape Like This on the Highway

by | Aug 17, 2016 | Art & Travel

Rhythms of form, color and pattern… visible from our cars.

I believe the rhythms of form and color and pattern visible from our cars is a truly modern subject matter in contemporary art.

I often drive through farmland on the way to visit family in southern Ontario where I live. And, pun intended, it’s a driving force in my landscape art.

I pass through stunning landscapes that inspire me with rich tapestries of abstract color and texture. And I believe that most people driving those same routes miss the real beauty that’s passing them by, streaking past them in their time-challenged hustle.

While there are for sure stretches of highway, especially along the major 4 or 6-lane routes, that can get numbingly repetitive and plain boring, I find once I get onto the country highways, the visual rhythm of the land changes. It becomes richer, more complex.

Even the rise and fall of the land gets more pronounced on country roads than on the major freeways, because those express routes are designed to be as smooth as possible. Speed rules. The straight line is almost the ideal for those routes, but that same line tends to impose somewhat of a mechanical order onto the landscape it passes through.

But secondary routes are prime source material for the landscape artist.

 

Country roads as lines in a vast drawing

Think of country roads for a moment, as lines in a vast drawing. Curving lines, full of grace and fun to drive, make for quite a different experience. When I create art, those passages bubble up in my memory, carrying up into consciousness the textures and large scale swaths of color that the lines draw across, releasing them up like bubbles in champagne.

There are spectacular forms and textures, all the stuff of great art, that stream by, slow enough to savor, yet quick enough to animate into a rhythmic flow. That’s what I try and release into my landscape artwork. They arrange into an animated flow of tapestry when I sit down to draw upon my memory and imagination to create landscape art. As I improvise, these textures seem to naturally come to life.

So many of us pass through stunning landscapes like these on the highway, yet remain disconnected from them through a grim focus on where we are going, and how fast we can get there, without savoring the journey itself, and all the visual grandeur we pass through.

 

Opening our eyes to rich tapestries of landscape

If we’ll just take our eyes off that hypnotic point on the road in the middle distance in front of us when we drive, we’ll open our eyes to rich tapestries of landscape.

It seems to take something like a work of art to wake up our sensibilities. So one of my artistic goals is to inspire us to open our eyes while we drive through vast stretches of our country, to receive the vital spark of life that courses through the lands we most take for granted.

Some of the vegetation we often characterize as scrubland, with its drifts of weeds and bush, are to me like brushstrokes.

The sweep of the plains, the grand scale of rolling hills, are the vast structures that seem to come to life when one drives, as opposed to the static view of painters past.

I soak up the scenes outside the windows of my car and savor them to the max. I hope you’ll do the same.