Hello beautiful friend :) There is something so deliciously wild about abstract art. The freedom to make a mess and call it a masterpiece!
Words have become almost useless to me these days. I sit down to write to you and I can't help but think that whatever I wish to say would be more effectively communicated through sound, music, than words. I never thought I would feel this way. I mean, my computer sits on top of two giant Oxford English Dictionaries, there are at least three dozen ink-filled journals beneath the couch in my music studio, and my phone holds hundreds of lyrics and voice memos that will never see the light of day. I used to think that words were the most powerful way to express how I feel but now I've learned to speak with abstract sounds and suddenly words fall flat. My beloved lyrics are standing on the sidelines wondering when they will be used again.
Carolina Grunér-Ashcroft https://www.instagram.com/carolinagruner/ is one of my favorite painters. She paints, in a pink-fill studio in Finland, following her intuition, an unexplainable sense from deep within guides her seemingly random brushstrokes. She paints "Landscapes of the Soul" and when she talks about her painting, I could copy and paste her words and use them to talk about my music. She wrote this the other day,
"I had such a great flow painting yesterday, and caught myself thinking this thought a couple of times, straight away feeling how I began pulling away from the flow. Got back on the wave though, and decided no one actually cares if the work is ready or not, or what it even looks like if and when it’s ready. It’s just ready when it is - and I’ll just *know* when that is." -- Carolina Grunér-Ashcroft
Can you relate?
There is something so deliciously wild about abstract art. The freedom to make a mess and call it a masterpiece! You’re not trying to replicate so you don’t have to control yourself. You’re in a big open field of nothingness and whatever rises to the surface, that’s your abstract. That’s the truth you find and share. You can swirl colors on a canvas and you can swirl audio waves on the computer.
When I started painting in my garage in 2017, I told myself to go crazy with it. There are no rules, in fact, the more messy and off the rails you go, the better. Where else in life can you be so reckless? Paint something and ruin it. See what it feels like to destroy and create in cycles. When I started making music in 2015, I thought I had to follow all the rules. I bought a Music Theory book on Amazon. I practiced scales for hours everyday. I learned traditional “song structure” which goes something like VERSE - CHORUS - VERSE - CHORUS - VERSE - CHORUS - CHORUS. But what if you don’t do that? What if your song isn’t a pattern? What if it’s linear?