When I paint, I almost always have music playing. Sometimes it fades into the background, but other times the rhythm slips right into my brushstrokes. I’ll step back from a piece and realize the movement across the canvas feels like a melody line, the pauses like rests in a song. It makes me think about how much music and visual art share the same language.
Rhythm You Can See
Music has beats, rests, crescendos. Painting has rhythm too—repetition of shapes, a pause of white space, or bold strokes that hit like drumbeats. When I layer dots or hatches with a pen, it feels almost percussive. When I let a color stretch in a long wash, it feels like a sustained note. Just like listening to a song, your eyes move across a painting, following a kind of tempo.
Texture and Tone
Texture in music can be the rasp of a voice, the distortion of a guitar, or the smooth rise of strings. In painting, it’s the grain of watercolor paper showing through, the layered buildup of paint, or the sharp line of a pen. Recently I’ve been playing with watercolors—watching yellow and red merge into saturated orange, then deepening into rust tones. It reminded me of sound swelling, the way a chord fills a room and leaves you feeling different than you were a moment before.
Harmony and Improvisation
A color palette can be like a chord progression: a bright, high-energy painting can feel like a song in a major key, while muted or moody tones can carry the weight of a minor key. And then there’s improvisation. When I let watercolor bleed into itself without controlling the outcome, it feels like jazz. The accidents become part of the piece, the way a band riffing on stage creates something unplanned and alive.
The Sound of Color
Art and music are both ways of holding memory and emotion. Neither has to be explained for someone to feel them. I think that’s why they feel so connected to me—because both are about resonance. When I paint, I’m not just arranging color; I’m composing a kind of music for the eyes.
Maybe that’s the bridge between the two: the desire to be heard, whether through sound or color. The rhythm of brushstrokes, the texture of paint, the harmony of a palette—they are all echoes, just like a song that lingers after the music stops.
