Seeking the Sound of Cobalt Blue
In 2014 my focus on the aural relationship of color to sound became focused on a singular color of cobalt blue. This became a new series titled Seeking the Sound of Cobalt Blue. My paintings range in scale from 2x3 in. to floor-to-ceiling paintings on heavy museum board. Additionally, I photograph all the phases of my painting process, including the non-art parts, like the table, the floor, paper towels — all exploring the nature of printmaking processes, texture, and saturated color. I see all of these parts as communicative tools expressing color's aural equivalents.
MoleculesofMusic
MoleculesofMusic is a series incorporating meta designs found in textiles, tiles and architecture, mapped over ColorSoundGrammar paintings. These designs, conceived by early humans also relate to modern scientific architectural structures, like DNA, String Theory and Chaos Theory.
MoleculesofMusic — Paintings
MoleculesofMusic — Combines
MoleculesofMusic_Combines are a series of digital collages. The distortion and decay inherent in each generation of reproducing an image, then scanning it, has its own beauty. Bits of information flatten from 3-D into binary code. The tempo in the image increases, just as the scanner races, in reading the complexities of the object.
ColorSoundGrammar
Influenced by scientific theories — both real and imagined — my abstract paintings, computer games and interactive performances build connections between color and sound. The ColorSoundGrammar Game enables viewers to practice sensory blending, or synaesthesia, as they pair colors with each note of the familiar Do re mi musical scale. While interacting in this playful manner, we discuss their thoughts about color and music in-depth. Documenting their responses in a computerized version of the game enables me to build a database of color/sound pairs. To date well over 600 people have played my ColorSoundGrammar Game. I have observed that certain consistencies in peoples' color/sound choices are emerging. From the data gathered, I often create paintings using a palette that is determined from gamers' color/sound pairs. I exercise artistic license when it comes to decisions made about composition and subject, while the palette is chosen from a drawn-out process of testing and data mining. Together, they bring a wonderful completion to this pseudo-scientific investigation and celebrate painting in all its glossy, gooey glory.
Play the ColorSoundGrammar Game
ColorSoundPattern
These paintings are, essentially, the studies that evolve from the ColorSoundGrammar series. In order to look more closely at different painted versions of each musical sound, I experiment with the colors and textures here on a larger scale.
Ecstatic Paint
Influenced by Symbolism and the early writers who opened our minds to abstraction, like Rimbault, Baudelaire and Mallarme, Ecstatic Paint is a series of paintings that allow the voice of the materials to come forward. Inviting viewers to look at abstract paintings while imagining the sound of each color or detail intensifies their focus. They release themselves to a lucid interplay between the senses, gaining heightened perception about the object's communicative power.
Projects
Interactive projects and installations exploring the intersection of color, sound, and perception.
Reverse Color Organ
The Reverse Color Organ is an interactive installation and web app that enables viewers to explore their own unique opinions about the sounds of colors. Viewers download the app to their phones, which become a synaesthetic tool.
ColorSoundGrammar Game
An interactive game enabling viewers to practice sensory blending, or synaesthesia, as they pair colors with each note of the familiar Do re mi musical scale.