Brief: Listen to a piece of music by a musician such as: George Gershwin, Beethoven, The Gypsy Kings or Miles Davis. Working and intuitively create marks , colours, textures etc that convey your sense of the chosen music.
I chose to listen to 'Ode to Joy' by Beethoven after being blown away by the above flash mob version which brought tears to my eyes and joy to my heart!
I basically just decided to launch right in having no real formal understanding of abstract art but being inspired by my recent journey to the Paul Klee exhibition at the Tate. He was a professional classical musician prior to becoming a visual artist. His work comes across as a symphony of colour and line and emotion. This inspired me to get cracking with this exercise as my initial thoughts about abstract illustration were filled with fear and trembling!
I really didn't do any preparation and decided to simply launch in and not think to much! I'm not sure if I followed the brief completely accurately but this is what I ended up with:
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| Acrylics, chalk pastels,coloured pencils |
and
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| oil pastels, ink and chalk pastels. |
From here I took a photo of each and then used the image editor programme Pixelmator to add text to the images to see what they would look like as cd covers:
I played around a bit with the type but struggled to get it exactly how I wanted it. I decided that it wasn't the end of the world if Beethoven's name wasn't particularly clear on the 1st version simply by virtue of the fact that he is so well known...not sure if this is permissible but this was my reasoning.
I found this exercise completely out of my comfort zone but enjoyed it thoroughly...far more then I expected to. I have a long way to go in exploring abstract art and illustration but am far less fearful about this genre and quite excited to continue experimenting.
