I have recently been thinking about certain pieces in the context of how they relate to some various cultural influences, including the music I listen to. Music can be such an ephemeral art and lately, I have been thinking that visual art is as well – much more of a residue or an artifact of some strange psychic activity than a product. Visual art suffers from its existence as an object and it is much easier to think of some other forms (music, film, poetry) as a temporary confluence of events. But regardless of the medium, the moment of consciousness and subsequent memory of art may be the most enduring form.

I was recently looking at the work of Harry  Smith, an artist who especially reminds me of my own goal as an artist to be free of conceptual rigidity. His oeuvre combined art, filmmaking, music, and mysticism in a continually fluid form of his own design. His work is also interesting to me because despite this profusion of influences, he is conceptually reductive in his intent:

"I've tried to make films that were of a universal nature, that could be shown to the Zulus or the Eskimos or anyone like that, and they would still have a generalized meaning for those people and would be irreducible to anything less than what those things are. Because everybody knows what it means when an egg breaks or when tears run out of eyes or when someone dies."

Like many artists, I spend much of my time when painting listening to music and am constantly feeling a relationship between music and my own intentions. It has definitely influenced much of my thinking about artwork and sometimes been a focus specific pieces, which I discuss in the links below below. It is music which engages in a poetry of time and language that slips the noose of any singular analysis, and at its best, describes the naked facts of our cultural existence.

I agree with Dave Hickey, whose book Air Guitar says that music is the "dominant art form of this American century." Hickey asks, "Could the art of Pollack or Brakhage exist without the imprimatur of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker? ... Could Andy Warhol exist without rock and roll?" His idea is that music is the first American art form to free itself from ordered social or academic conventions.

Also a compelling idea is Carlos  Santanas' assertion that music changes us by actually changing the structure of cells in our body, as we listen. Maybe art really does happen not just in the head but also on some molecular level. Its certainly an idea worth considering.



Slow Numbers There Is Another World Going To California Night Flower The Voices


by Lynn Talbot, 2003 – view more works on my painting site, www.lynntalbot.com