Be forewarned: this is a text heavy post.

I believe that music and poetry and literature and dance and visual art and acting and science and everything that require creative and critical leaps of logic are extremely closely related. And, I find it almost funny how they also share the same terminology sometimes. And, in my head; and, in my sketchbook, I write notes to myself. Oftentimes this refers to music because I find that the closest association to the creation of visual art.


And the funny thing is they share so much wonderful terminology:

• Rhythm
• Structure
• Tone
• Harmony
• Repetition
  
• et cetera

And the funny thing is is the vocabulary that describes music is wonderfully expressive:

• Crescendo
• Drone
• Dissonance
• Melody
• Staccato
• et cetera

Isn't it just lovely how they correlate?

So when I draw... I try and draw the music, if that makes any sense whatsoever to anyone aside from myself.

And I love to dissect terms and apply them abstractly to other parts of my understanding of the world; especially if I have no other sympathetic words at my disposal, or if that application creates an interesting thought relationship that I can attempt to explore.

So;

phrase: Everyone knows what a phrase is, but it also applies to music (Music. a division of a composition, commonly a passage of four or eight measures, forming part of a period. (dictionary.com)) and dance (Dance. a sequence of motions making up part of a choreographic pattern.(dictionary.com). So... can't it apply to the description of visual art? The phrase in dance is essentially a division with time, or step count acting as the bounding markers. The phrase in music is again bounded by time, but due to the formal method of musical notation it can be divided into measures (of time). So, to me this means that in visual art this can apply to a fragment of a larger composition. However I believe that, just as in music and dance not every random selection of notes or motions will make sense, not every random fragment of an image is a phrase. Therefore a phrase in terms of visual art, to me, applies to a composition within a larger composition...

Everything applies across all mediums.



Draw music.


The second thing that I try and draw. Is I try and draw movement. This is slightly less abstract because movement is seen, and so it can be visually analyzed. You can describe it in vectors, in left, right, up or down. But... it is a little more complex than that. Because you need to give the viewer a starting point and a finish line... sort of.

I mean... movement is distance over time. How do you get time in a still image? Well... simple really. Give the eye places to stop. You will create a visual beat. So the speed of the movement is the amount of space you cover over a visual beat. Yeah. I try and draw movement.

I'll try and describe this more later, but I think I covered the gist of it.