Tag: creativity

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Music on my Mind

First, my index cards from week five, prompts were citrus, arcade, font, earrings, periwinkle, board game and lantern:

Music is a powerful force on our minds.  How many times have you sung along at the top of your lungs to a favorite tune on the radio as you drive around, or jumped up and danced around uninhibited while no one was looking.  How many more times have you wanted to sing out and dance like crazy?  A song can bring back very specific memories.  What do you define as music?  To me, music is not just the recordings or performances of human voice and sounds resonating out of instruments being played.  This time I hear the songs of birds and insects when I step outside.  Every once in a while, my brain dredges up the clatter of the vintage candy factory line that I used to run.  The fondant cutter had an especially interesting series of repeated clicks and cranks.  Somehow, these sounds come out in some of my collages.

Composers have many variables to utilize in the creation of a piece of music, just like visual artists have their own “language” of design elements.  With these close similarities in the creative process, it is not surprising that one often influences the other.   Jiri Anderle often textured his prints with mark making techniques carries over from his stints as a drummer in a band.  The Russian composer Mussorgsky was inspired to write “Pictures at an Exhibition” from viewing paintings by Viktor Hartmann.  In turn, the music came back out in the visual art through a stage setting by Kandinsky.

I don’t believe that you have to know much about music to enjoy it or be inspired by it.  Listen closely, pay attention to the instruments, the patterns and repetitions, the variances in notes and chords, the time that notes are held, the spaces of pauses in between notes.  How can you transform what you hear into visual shapes, lines, marks, color and texture?  Try listening to a piece of music that you are not familiar with, and make some marks with pencil and paper while you listen.  I plan on trying this myself over the weekend, check back next week to see my efforts.

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The Index Cards Keep Coming…

I am rolling along with the Index Card a Day challenge.  The prompts for week four were anchor, terrarium, emerald, cappuccino, bougainvillea, souvenir and wind chimes.

I don’t think that the writing that I did on the wind chimes card will show up in the picture.  It reads, “Why should the birds, the crickets and the cicadas be the only ones in nature’s orchestra? The wind wants to join in the symphony.”

Somehow, we have arrived at the turnover of another month, and it is once again time for me to share my 4×4” squares for June.  Partway through May, I started limiting myself to one color for a week.  I continued this single color exploration in June.

Working in a single color made me really pay attention to using different color values – light and dark tints, tones and shades.  Using a range of color values adds more visual interest, just like using textures, or varying shape sizes, lengths and widths of design elements.  I am moving on from my own little color challenge, I don’t know yet if I will work in a theme for July’s 4×4 squares.  I do know that I need to get stitching.  Surf on over here next week for something on the music that rings in my head and my art.

 

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Index Cards, Music, Fiction

ICAD week three is done, and I am still keeping up! The prompts this past week were: dandelion, robot, mustard yellow, six word story, pause, birdhouse, geode.  I cannot honestly say that I like any of my cards from last week, but the important thing is that I made something for each one.  I am intrigued by the concept of the six word story, it is not an easy concept!  A couple of years ago, I read a book about writing flash fiction (under 1000 words) and I would like to explore it in my writing someday.

Speaking of things I want to explore, it is high time that I get around to rambling about music and visual art.  This will be part of a series, for now I just have some ideas for you to ponder.  Music is often used in movies to add impact to a scene; think back on parts of your life and identify what song could be played over a given event in the movie of your life.  What song is the soundtrack to your life right now?  Many songs could be considered a form of flash fiction, could a piece of art be considered flash fiction?  Where are the boundaries of the definitions of art, music and fiction?  These music and art musings will happen in little bits here, it looks like I will be posting once a week for now as I work on various other creative projects.  There are so many ideas wanting to come out of my head!  See you next week for a summary of the week’s creative efforts in my world.

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April Squares Bring… More Squares in May?

OK, just ignore my poor attempt at a pun in the title!  Another short and sweet today, here are the 4×4 squares that I have stitched this past month:

Out of each group, which square do you like the best?  Which one do you like the least?

How do you feel about the color combinations?  I definitely notice that certain colors attract me on a certain day, but on another day, I wonder what I was thinking.

Do you like the stitch selections that I chose for the pieces?  What stitches would you have used?

If you love hand stitching like I do, I hope that you will try a few squares.  Even if you haven’t done a lot of hand stitching, give it a try!  These squares do not take long to complete, and who knows, you just might discover a new passion.

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Stitching to Music

I will get to the trial piece that I talked about last post – later this week, I promise.  Today, I want to share a couple of  4″ squares that I made while listening to opera.  The Metropolitan Opera is streaming a different opera performance daily during this coronavirus shut down.

The square on the left was made while listening on the radio to the Saturday afternoon broadcast of Puccini’s  Tosca.  The square on the right was created while I watched Dvorak’s Rusalka last night.  My process was to first listen and/or watch for about 15-20 minutes.  Then, I started picking out my fabrics from my scrap stash.  I kept on listening while arranging and rearranging the fabric bits that I selected.  After I had the pieces placed, I listened for another bit of time while deciding how to stitch the square, then commenced the stitching.  Of course, last night I stopped work frequently to watch the action on my computer screen, and made mental notes from some of the stunning costumes.  I finished the squares by the final curtain, but I was certainly not trimming or stitching during the entire opera performance.  Even when I am not trying to multi-task, I spend a fair amount of time on my art quilts in a thinking mode before I take action on them.

Now, I would never expect anyone to correctly guess the piece of music that was playing while I made one of my collages, but I enjoy linking the music that inspired me to the visual art as a part of its story.  It would be fun to get a few other artists together to create their own individual responses to the same piece of music.  Check back on Thursday for my progress on last week’s experiment.