MusicpaintingLIVE: HOW video
The process in the studio …
Shostakovich Prelude & Fugue No.24 – clip
Festival “Winteravonden aan de Amstel” – Hermitage Amsterdam 2018
Nikolai Medtner – Sonata Reminiscenza: video
Festival “Winteravonden aan de Amstel”, Hermitage Amsterdam 2018
MusicPainting Live with pianist Reinis Zarins and painter Maryleen Schiltkamp at the Markiezenhof, Bergen op Zoom (Netherlands) November 2017
MusicPaintingLive
MusicPaintingLive is a new performance art, combining music and painting directly by making the painting during the recital or concert.
Together with the Latvian pianist Reinis Zarins, I have recently devoted myself to the performance art of painting music. It is our aim to invent a visual language reflecting the music, in a way that is specific for each music piece and enhances the experience of music.
By its nature, this new art/music form is defined as a process, more than as a final result. The most interesting part is to see it being made. Therefore, It exists mostly as a live-performance taking place in a theater or experimental stage-setting, and afterwards as video recordings.
For each piece we have an abstract – and a representative way of approach.
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- Debussy – L’isle Joyeuse
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- Franck choral – color charts
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- Fugue – pencil charts
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- Franck fugue – polyphonic, 4 voices
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- Fugue – pencil charts
After listening to the music I start to make sketches to translate the music into charts or visual symbols; first by pencil lines, almost like a seismograph, and from there on to color studies, until I worked through the whole piece, exactly in the time intervals we agreed on. The scale of these charts is sketchbook size (20 x 30 cm or somewhat larger)
then continuing to make larger scale sketches, listening and internalizing the music in an intuitive, motoric way and training myself to be simultaneous with the music-time.all the separate sketches then are taped together to ‘read’ them from beginning to end.
Chopin Ballade – visual score
A visual score is now created from from the separate sketches; in a way this is a summary, but it is more a creation to visually encompass the music piece, a design that now also follows some visual laws and necessities of expression – the music has entered the visual domain, so to say, and becomes transformed.
this visual score is transferred to a larger, performance scale (for instance 250 x 150 cm) on paper to practice, or canvas try-outs in acrylic paint, and I train myself on the music-time:
the painting starts when the music starts and ends likewise.
Improvisations
Reinis and Maryleen also set up sessions where they improvise instead of working with an existing piece of music. This is an even more direct way of responding to each other and work towards a synergy of music and painting.
