Design Development

I displayed a lot of my drawings together to try and think of a way to develop some designs that grew from my explorations. I saw an artist doing this recently as a major part of her creative practice and wanted to try it.

I hoped to find a way to connect my music collages to my drawings.

I thought I would be drawn to the Bach collage and it’s colours, but instead I was struck by the brightness of the Mingus collages, and the yellow flower drawings. This made me consider how much I stick to familiar colour schemes and using music as a source of inspiration could be a useful tool to explore different combinations. I don’t know what I was expecting to come out of this review process, but other than colour I do not feel I made any significant new connections between my music collages and my drawings. The artist I observed doing reviewing her work in this way works to very open outcomes, her work could be 2 or 3D, big small, any media or setting. I am working to a fixed outcome, does this mean the music explorations have limited applications? Is this a bad thing? It is like a limited palette of colours that might be used to develop colour mixing skills. If I had any possible outcome available to me at this stage in the creative process which direction would my thoughts be going in now? I find this question very hard to answer as I don’t have a big range of skills at my disposal. I know if the current assignment did not specify a representational theme I would definitely be exploring music and art connections in much more abstract visual forms. Maybe to keep this exploration genuine I need to take this in an abstract direction, and not think about the assignment at all. This is not to say exploring connections between music and art cannot be representational at some stage, but the music I have been using to create my visual association collages is purely abstract, so I am unsure how I could apply this to a representational image. Maybe this highlights part of the problem in my working practices. I have found a theme to explore that is bigger than this particular assignment and it makes me question if I should be working or thinking in discrete assignments at all.

So this activity has raised many questions, it has also given me some ideas to develop further:

I could use a piece of music to create a style or theme to apply to an image. I could take lines and colors inspired by the music to style an image or take a simple block and use variable inking to create the theme on the block with colors. 

I could create a varied series of the same block each variation with a colour theme from a different piece of music. 

The question remains, would this work on a representational image? If I took a simple block would the image need to make some connection to the music?

As I am creating a representational image for my collagraph, I think I want to put some of these ideas on hold, and work on my assignment mainly as a development of my drawings of flowers. I can use color to apply one of my music 'themes' to this block, but I'm not sure really I have that idea figured out in my head yet.