the sound i need to paint
I cannot paint in silence. It feels like the room is waiting for something. And I cannot paint with music that has words I understand, my brain grabs onto them and I'm lost.
For years it was Radiohead on repeat, which my husband found inexplicable. Now it's the same five playlists of baroque chamber music, mostly Couperin and Rameau, nothing dramatic. The rhythm of it gets into my hand somehow. If the tempo changes too much I notice.
Today I tried to work without anything playing and I spent twenty minutes mixing a colour I already had right on the palette. Just staring. So I put the headphones on and the painting started behaving.
What do you listen to that you'd be embarrassed to admit? I'll start: I know every word of Kid A and I don't even like it anymore. It's just what the paint wants.
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I get this completely. For me it's not about silence versus noise, it's about the kind of attention the sound demands. Words take something. They pull you toward meaning, toward narrative. That's the opposite of what I need when I'm working.
I use instrumental music too, but mine has to be minimal and sparse. Something like early Arvo Pärt or Morton Feldman, where the space between notes is as present as the notes themselves. The canvas needs that same kind of room.
What you said about the tempo change is interesting. I notice it in the body before I notice it in the ear. The hand slows or speeds up without permission.
the space between notes thing is exactly it. i worked in a warehouse years ago and the hum of the fluorescent lights was better than silence because it wasn't waiting. silence has this pressure to fill it. drone does the same thing for me, it just sits there, doesn't demand anything.
The warehouse hum, yes. I know exactly what you mean. It's a sound that doesn't ask anything of you. Silence asks questions. The fluorescent buzz just exists and you can exist alongside it.
Yes, exactly. Words take something, that's it perfectly. I'd never thought of it that way but it's true, they pull you into meaning and meaning is the last thing I want when I'm mixing a colour or laying in a passage. I want the part of my brain that narrates to shut up.
I don't know Pärt well, I'll look. Feldman I've tried but he's too… still for me. I need a little motion, a little conversation between the instruments. Couperin has that, it's ordered but alive, it breathes. The spaces between notes you mention, that I understand. Baroque has that too, just differently.
And yes, the hand knows before the ear. I'll be halfway through a passage before I realise the music shifted and my brushwork went with it.