PRELUDE 23: THE WEBERN MONOKROMES

The six collage/drawings of my PRELUDE 23 represent visual interpretations of the music of the early 20th century composer Anton Webern whose compositions are generally short, stark, and edgy. The challenge for me--who normally uses vibrant colors--was to create a unified series using only black, gray, and white. Each piece, measuring approximately 18 by 24 inches, is an attempt to duplicate visually what I hear in the angular, often gritty music of Webern, similar to the way a choreographer invents a note book to symbolize the movements of a dance.

As is true with all my work, I compose my drawings/collages with a deliberately chosen “alphabet” of shapes, colors and designs. Geometric forms—especially circles, rectangles, and triangles—handwriting strokes, etching marks made with knives and pencils, and smudges created with erasers form some of my basic music-inspired language. I use crayons, graphite pencils, spray paints, and pens because of their simple immediacy and because they form an autobiographical link straight back to my childhood. Thus my art and the tools used to make that art are my fingerprint, my retina scan, my DNA signature.

These collages are both an interpretation and a synesthetic adaptation; just as a film director might take a novel and turn it into a visual work of art, so I attempt to bring my understanding and reaction to Webern’s music onto paper. I want viewers to “hear” and “see” Webern through my imagination and invite them to consider the larger issue about how we all see or hear the things in our lives—the books we read, the music we listen to, and the films we watch. These collages are part of a long tradition of art that was inspired by other art, but are also meant to be instigations of larger questions about how we all see and interpret the world around us.

Media: cut drawing paper, transparency paper, acrylic paint, ink, graphite, markers, crayons.

19 by 25 inches framed.