Father and son team

My father is the violinist Moshe Hammer who incidentally played with "Pinky"

Harmonious collaboration Mike & Moshe Hammer  click image to enlarge

Zukerman as a small child for the Queen of Belgium at the age of 12! We collaborate in a performance called Beethoven Meets Pollock where he plays, often with other musicians, and I paint or draw. We've performed for fundraisers and in concert halls throughout Ontario, Canada. Recently, we began performing in schools. Music and art are intertwined.

Music like painting in public

Your input on music lies close to my own discoveries. Are many painters also musicians? I am. My musical media are various keyboards, which allow great variety in structure and complexity. Music is art in real time. As soon as the brain conceives of a variation (for those of us who play themes with our own versions of accompaniment) it is rendered, and artist and audience (viewer?) can react simultaneously. It is like painting in public, but much more compressed. Sometimes listening or playing music, I almost "see" how the emotion that is generated could be expressed graphically. The use of terms employed in music (rhythm, balance, harmony etc.) seem to underline it. Are these observations shared by others?

Exchangeable vocabulary

When asked to talk about my work, I've often found myself speaking in musical

Dancing in the Shelter original painting  click image to enlarge

terms. When the work is "in the zone" (you know that realm) it feels more like musical composition or choreography than painting. There is something of the essence of creative expression that informs and transcends all its manifestations – and when you touch it – magic! During an interview, the cellist Itzhak Perlman was asked, "What is going through your mind as you Play?" – A look of wonderment came over his face as he said, "Colors!"

Loud music in studio

I often listen to music loudly as it distracts me from any outside noises and even people calling me from another room. I'm in my early 30s and still living in the same house where I have lived since I was seven. I just checked out a stack of music from a library and found that searching for music is just as enjoyable as listening while painting. It's a matter of finding the music that works for the artist.

Hauls out her cello

As I work in my studio, music has three major roles. Working on landscapes or still

Elk Lake Path original painting  click image to enlarge

life, the chatter, interesting information and choices on public radio, plus CDs – particularly of Bach – have a wonderful way of occupying a certain part of my brain, and allowing the other senses to float through colour choices, line and design with spontaneity. While working on portraits, music that appeals to my subject relaxes the sitter and repeats the above function for me. And when a break, a "step back to allow for fresh eyes" is necessary, I haul out my cello and do an intense practice. My studio would not have the same allure without the musical counterpart.

Family of hummers

My Father, Luc LeBon was an abstract expressionist painter who immigrated to the

Baltic Sea Coast original painting  click image to enlarge

USA from Antwerp, Belgium, and jazz is what fueled his creative energy. As for me, I like silence as I get into a meditative state, though I love music and my 16-year-old son is becoming a musician. I work the best when my husband is in the same room with me. We work well in each other's presence, where we don't speak too much. It is his energy field or something that I must tap into. I love that he loves my art, which is the ultimate compliment to me, and it keeps me forever going. As a family we hum art, it is all around us and we create and influence each other. In a way we are creating our own little world in an old shoebox.

Painting to music in school

I attended a girls' school in Bryn Mawr, PA, USA. We had an art teacher by the name of Mrs. Terry. She was a wonderful inspiration in elementary and middle school classes. I will never forget painting to music (classical of course). It influences me to this day. I love rhythm, soft curves, and bright colors when listening to Musetta's Waltz from La Boheme or Prokofiev brings out a frantic rush and complex abstraction. Music and art both spring from a grateful heart.

Music and calligraphy

I've always believed that music of all types, including the music of nature, is integral

original calligraphy  click image to enlarge

to creativity. I am a calligrapher and, in that capacity, paint with words. I always tell my students that we are artists who interpret words, expressing the emotion that the words evoke on paper. One of the exercises I use is to play various passages of music and have the students commit their feelings to paper with ink and paint using expressive marks and words. Calligraphy has in the past been thought of as communication craft but has, in more recent years, come into its own as expressive art.

Music as antidote for mediocrity

Creeping mediocrity is my greatest fear as a painter. My music for a desert island is Music for Egon Schiele by a group called Rachel's. I cannot get tired of it. It transports me to some exceptional place inside myself that, while somewhat melancholy, feels like a true home. No mediocrity whatsoever. In fact, I'm going to listen to it right now.

Music does the painting

I am occasionally invited to set up my easel on the side of a small stage, while my friend Bill Hutchinson and his band perform. There's some wild energy to be tapped into, in the presence of an attentive audience and talented musicians. It's fun to do a demonstration painting without having to talk, or explain. And because no one actually expects me to produce a decent painting under what would be, for most artists, daunting circumstances, the pressure is off. For reasons I can't explain, I have done some of my favorite paintings on Bill's stage. What they lack in detail and precision, they gain in energy and spirit. People seem to enjoy witnessing the process. And there are those wonderful moments, when it feels like the music is doing the painting, and I am just along for the ride.

Chanting for ecstasy

You have touched a place where I get lost and found and completely inspired. I experience music this way, and its qualities are embodied visually in my work. I key into the sounds of exquisite voices and instruments that carry a passionate and otherworldly sound and space. This sound creates openness, contours, expanse and can define a specific moment. From childhood I was in tune with the expressive, liberating quality of music. It is no surprise that I have found a yogic path that uses chanting as a means to awaken. Sanskrit chanting meets me in the place that my creative gestures meet me as I paint. Undulating with a feeling of form turned in on itself and back again, Sanskrit chanting and line work express a felt experience. There is a rich world of ecstasy that chanting and painting allow. There are many chanters who are noteworthy, who are doing great musical work such as Dave Stringer, Krishna Das and Rasa led by Kim Waters with classical instruments backing her. All are Americans who have been led to this practice of devotional chanting.

Abstractions and interpretations

With the camera, the computer, cinema and television, representational painting has no

MONO CLIFFS #1 Acrylic 30 x 60 inches  click image to enlarge

need anymore to get it right. A snapshot records; a painter interprets and abstracts. In this letter, you say that the abstract, musical aspects of painting make the difference "between perceived mastery and creeping mediocrity." That can't be stated strongly enough.

To set out to "record" a motif is a recipe for mediocrity. Rather, to set up themes and counter-themes, to lead the eye like a crescendo leads the ear, to have "forte" passages and "pianissimo" passages, to use colour "incorrectly" to create a mood – these abstractions are what make for good representational paintings. Along these lines, I love the thinking of American artist Ted Goerschner. Ted really pushes abstract qualities in his book Oil Painting: The Workshop Experience, and I recommend it to any artist who wants to record less and interpret more.

Synesthesia

If one listens to music deeply and long enough, one can hear and see (feel) the

music interpretations of Pachelbel's Canon in D major, harp variation

colours created by the vibrations of the individual and groupings of sounds. One can see the colour of the instruments. This is called synesthesia. The definition of synesthesia is the production of a mental sense impression relating to one's sense by stimulation of another sense of certain sounds with colours. Through this process one can with paint interpret music. It's fun to do and is a great outlet to free oneself when one wants to be creative and have a change from the usual daily discipline of painting or creating how one usually does.

(RG note) Thanks Alfred. A letter and responses about the curious phenomenon of synesthesia are at www.painterskeys.com/clicks.asp?n=synesthesia.html

Face your demons

When I was growing up my sister was classified as the artist and I was the academic. I stayed in that role and feared venturing into my sister's territory until I finally took a whole year off work last year and faced a lot of my demons. It turned out they weren't demons at all and the only reason they were shouting so loudly was because I had selective hearing! It's a common defect I believe.

I teach forestry in a college here in the west of Ireland and every day I see magnificent sunrises, misty landscapes, unusual contrasting textures and love inspiring sunsets. I never thought about creativity and the necessity of it for the sustenance of the human soul until within the last two years or so. By then this particular human soul was crying out for it. After a year of engaging in all sorts of creative projects from making clothes and jewelry, to two different types of boats, I finally had the courage to turn to a canvas. That moment I broke into laughter and couldn't stop. I was by myself. Life is good and it is particularly good every Tuesday and Friday, when I get your letters and when I indulge myself enough to be creative--whatever form that takes. Thank God for friends, landscapes and music.

Below is a sample listing from our growing database of artists and art organizations. Everytime you visit a 'clickback' a different link listing (chosen at random) will be displayed. You can try it out right now by refreshing this page (click the Refresh or Reload button of your browser).

To see more listings from our C section click here