Rhythm in colour and gesture: Compositions in colour
I have long wondered about the connections between music and painting in my art. While music reaches the emotions, paintings can too; but there is something about the ‘activity’ required for both that is powerfully important. While painting the hands and fingers need to react with utmost sensitivity and wrists, elbows, arms and shoulders remain supple and free. This physical involvement is similar in the study of pianoforte and the performance of works at an advanced level.
For me the activity of painting and drawing, or playing piano, is a kinaesthetic experience that is beyond exertion, freely in tune with the process of creation, with the mind totally focused on the production of sounds in time, or shapes, rhythms and colours in space.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered a letter written by Gunta Stölzl (1897–1983), a student of Johannes Itten (1888–1967) at the Bauhaus. Describing his teacher’s methods, he wrote:
Firstly one had to train one’s hand and make the fingers flexible. Just as a piano player does finger exercises, so we too did finger exercises. Already in these initial sessions we sensed how rhythm arises; endless movement in a circle, starting as if from the fingertips, with movement flooding through the wrist, elbow and shoulder until it reached the heart—that is what one had to feel when forming each stroke and each line. No more drawing without feeling or with half-understood rhythm. Drawing was not reproducing what is seen, but letting what one feels from external stimuli (and from inner ones too of course) stream through the whole body.