Can music help us create artistic content?
Why do certain chords evoke specific emotions?
Why do major chords make us feel ‘happy’ while minor chords can make us feel ‘sad’?
To our creative brains, a sound is never a sound. These vibrations contain layers of meaning – questions, intentions, and purposes.
Recently I’ve been wondering about the effects of listening to different music as I create.How does listening to different genres influence the final artwork?
We may not be consciously aware of this musical influence, but it’s there nonetheless.
Music can have a profound effect on us. But how do we translate musical ideas and emotions directly into our work?
Nobody can tell you exactly how to do this, but just as you can find and transfer inspiration from other sources you can transform inspiration from music as well.
Anyone who’s taken one of my online classes will tell you how passionate I am about the need to create a connection. The work must first evoke a feeling or emotion before the viewer can truly connect with it.
If you can’t make that connection, it’s just another image…like the dozens of images we see every day and simply pass by.
We can draw upon our emotional response to a particular piece of music to inspire our composition, or our choice of colors and subject matter.
As I think more and more about music, I consider the variations in the way music can be performed, and its correlation to creating art.
Ansel Adams said of the traditional black and white photographic process, “The negative is the score; the print is the performance.” Translated to photo encaustic this could be, “The photograph is the score; the beeswax and pigments are the performance.”
We all respond in different ways to different music, but there’s no doubt it has an undeniable emotional effect on all of us.
I invite you to quietly observe what happens to your artwork and the different emotions that arise within you as you’re listening to different songs, artists, or genres.
I’m guessing that your artwork will follow those emotions.
Would love to hear any comments on how music effects your work and/or the music you most listen to when creating.
Be well….be creative,
