Painting Music

I love encountering people who show me a new way to see something or who introduce me to a fresh perspective. I had always thought of music as intangible and invisible - I hear it but I can’t see it. And then I met artist Caroline Tate, who paints music.

We met at the Hilary Gialerakis exhibition last week while we were both taking in the Girl with the Unicorn. “What do you mean, you ‘paint music’?” I asked.

“I put onto canvas what the music evokes for me,” Caroline explained. “You know, the emotion, the mood. Sometimes I also use the actual notes, the musical notation, and incorporate it as part of my painting.”

For me, paintings always seem static, capturing a moment in time whereas music takes time and cannot be captured like a snapshot. So it took awhile for me to understand how one could paint music. But as Caroline described her love of music and her attempts to capture it on canvas, I began to visualise fluid movements of a paint brush and the balletic flowing of an artist’s hand and body as music danced around them.

I said to Caroline that I tend to prefer narrative so books and movies and writing are what capture my imagination and music and painting lack sufficient narrative momentum to draw me into their vortex and keep me there in the way that a story told through time would. “That’s the writer in me, I guess.”

“You paint with words,” Caroline said. “That’s the only difference.”

Later on, over the weekend, I was thinking about what she said as I pottered about at home and I remembered the first time I heard Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

The four movements are meant to evoke spring, summer, autumn and winter and it’s an easy piece to “get” - there’s the jolly frolicking tune for summer, the darker notes for winter and so on. But for me, it didn’t make me think of the seasons of nature. I found myself imagining the music as a narrative about the four stages in a love story in a cityscape - how a little nothing leads to an argument and one of them storms out of their city apartment; the other is left alone in the silent apartment, sitting still in a rocking chair, thinking back to moments in their time together that gets them to this point; the question is, does the other one come back, does the woman left alone get up and go and find him…. And I would listen to the piece over and over again, fine tuning the story in my mind and teasing out the details of the emotions and how tension could be built into the narrative in counterpoint to the music.

Huh.

I can see music after all.

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Picture: Caroline’s painting of Gustav Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony

Caroline’s next exhibition “Patterns of a Landscape” is at the Barbican from 4-30 November and is based on her month long trip to New Zealand earlier this year. You can check out her website at www.ctate.co.uk, where you can see - and buy - her paintings.