My artistic process has always relied on a strong sudden impulse to create. My paintings suffer under much pre-planning and from attempting to visualise a clear narrative. I was overjoyed to find that music was a perfect catalyst for me. It is not just a visualisation of a sound that I was able to paint, but a tangle of sensory associations - from the stories, the feelings, the colours of the landscapes which frame the music. Song is always unified with place but never set in stone. I have created art works which link the songs with a place in my own mind, such as the aerial landscape painting of 'Down in the Valley', works which link to the actual place of the song, such as my 'Banks of the Ohio' painting, and from imagined places which entered my mind from listening to the songs, such as my dream-like landscape of 'Barbary Allen'.
While we were all given the same stimulus for our projects each week, everybody's work was so incredibly different. And although we were all working from a second hand source, somebody else's songs, every piece of work felt amazingly genuine and personal. Perhaps this is why we love music so much; it does not exist in a sphere apart from us but forms a part of our memory and our sense of place.
I could say so much about the history of the songs we have sung and loved, but I think the best part of this class is the way in which we have created our own personal histories together as a group. From the often bizarre connections and experiences we have drawn together to form our own collection of songs and storytelling.
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