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Paintings are not always inspired by visual sources. An aural landscape can be as valid a stimulus for a painting as a visual landscape; one merely receives it through another sense. This is especially true of abstract painting. Everyone, in some way or another, perceives or experiences music in visual terms. This kind of synesthesia was popular with experimental composers at the start of the Twentieth century. Being an abstract painter my business is not reproduce visual reality; I don’t draw what I see. I believe that figurative painting can limit the viewer’s response to a work of art. It is easy to be sidetracked by admiring merely the quality of drawing or seduced by the illusionism of a figurative image. Music, when it does not contain words, is by its intrinsic nature, an abstract statement. Abstract painting, to my sensibility, is closer to a musical experience than figurative painting can ever be. Vaughan Williams’ music is a case in point. Listening to his nine symphonies is like being taken on a series of aural journeys to extraordinary places. Sometimes we are introduced to very beautiful terrain as in his elegiac Pastoral Symphony. At other times we are lead, like Dante, through terrifying landscapes as in the confrontational Symphonies 4 and 6. I wanted to respond in visual terms to the unique sound world that Vaughan Williams offers us in these major works. The symphonies with titles immediately evoked specific colours and images. A Sea Symphony, A Pastoral Symphony and Sinfonia Antartica suggested images that had to be blue, green and white respectively. Some of the non-named symphonies also readily suggested colours. The opening bars of Symphony 4 suggest the strongest crimson. This kind of simple synethesia helped to produce this series of paintings which are visual equivalents of these extraordinary musical landscapes.
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© 2007, Gerard Hastings |