ColorSoundGrammar

Influenced by scientific theories-both real and imagined my abstract paintings and interactive performance build connections between color and sound.

This exploration has led me to create a series of interactive games with viewers the most recent being The Alphabet Game. To play, viewers select, from colored squares, the color(s) that best represent each note in the familiar ABC Song melody. Through these playful interventions we discuss their thoughts about color and music in-depth.

Documenting their responses in the form of photographs and notes in journals, I have compiled the results of approximately 150 people who have played the Alphabet Game.  Some consistencies in peoples’ color/sound choices have emerged. 

I have distilled the data that has been gathered and have been painting series of alphabets based on these generalizations. These alphabet paintings introduce a wonderful completion to this pseudo-scientific investigation and celebrate painting in all its glossy, gooey glory. 

In 2009 I began a more meditative alphabet wherein I am making larger-scale paintings of my own personal color/sound grammar called ColorSoundGrammar3.  Sometimes I can sustain a note and carry it, vibrating in my mind, and humming it at length, for days, even weeks as I attempt to make the aural visual.  When each painting is completed, I then write its literal equivalent in the form of a stream-of-consciousness poem, continuing the process of sensory blending and left-brain/right-brain mashing.

ColorSoundGrammar 3

ColorSoundGrammar 1 & 2

ColorSoundGrammar3 | details

ColorSoundAlphabet