I finished my painting for Contextual Studies this evening. I have to say, it turned out a bit differently from what I expected before I started working on it. You see, I was working in Life Drawing class today, and we were working to music to see how it affects your style. Now, I live for music – it’s my life blood. I always paint to music, and I usually put my collection on random order, so the mood constantly changes. However, today we worked for half an hour to ‘relaxing’ music, half an hour to ‘aggressive’ music, and half an hour to ‘dark’ music. It really depends on how you look at music. The relaxing music was Ravi Shankar, which I found to be quite up-tempo. The aggressive music was by Animal Collective, which was more avante-garde and slightly disconcerting, rather than aggressive, and the dark music was by Massive Attack, which to me is chillout music but with a hint of darkness in it. Most people would call thrash and death metal aggressive. However, I love both of them, and generally don’t find them aggressive. I hear the melody in it, and I relax to it. So I guess it’s all relative.
I found it difficult to paint in a relaxing style, because, well, it’s not really me. The aggressive style suited me far more, because it’s more expressive. I also found the dark style to be too hypnotic so I don’t feel that the darkness comes across in my painting. Unfortunately, I forgot my first painting, so I can’t show it just now, but I’ve included the others.
This one is painted to Animal Collective, and is supposed to be aggressive. I personally love this one. The style is completely different for me, and I absolutely loved painting it. I just got lost in the music.
This next one was done to ‘dark’ music – Massive Attack – but as you can see the painting isn’t very dark, and to be honest, it’s not a particularly good painting either. There are so many mistakes in it, but I know what corrections I need to make.
Which brings me back nicely to my painting for Contextual Studies. As I said, this turned out completely differently from what I expected. I was heavily influenced by my life drawing today, and sought to bring that into this painting. This is quite dark, but I was painting to different types of music, so there are many styles here. I’m really pleased with this one also. Since I am basing this on several paintings by Dali and Picasso, two of which feature the imageries of war, I feel that this expresses those sentiments fairly well. I am becoming much more comfortable with being expressive and trying different styles of painting – coming out of my comfort zone, I suppose. As usual you can click on all of the paintings to enlarge.
Going back to the idea of music influencing painting style: do you listen to music when you’re painting? If so, what kind of music do you listen to, and what does it do for your style? Perhaps you don’t listen to music. Perhaps you can try, to see how it affects your style. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
