My work is influenced by America’s original art form, Jazz and Blues. I like to think of my work as composing with color. My ideal vision is to create a world in color as Theionious Monk created a world in sound.
Music grows out of liberation of improvisational impulse from musical conventions, like cord changes, steady beat, and tonality. Abstract Expressionists like Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, and Jackson Pollack dispensed with the conventions of traditional representation in order to showcase the raw energy which went into the painting creation.
To rephrase Kipling, conventional wisdom maintains that “art is art and Music is music, and never the twain shall meet.” Art after all, exists in space, while music unfolds in time. Art appeals to the sense of sight, while music appeals to the ear. An art work can be viewed all at once, while a piece of music is inseparable from the succession of moments which it fills. And yet, the two disciplines seem to exhibit an insatiable longing to mend into each other. This is obvious from the language used to discuss each art form. Music writers often take the poetic liberty of speaking of the colors of notes and phrases, while art critics have embraced the word tone, which originated as a music term, to discuss the subtle shading of light and darkness in a particular hue. The movement of brush strokes across the canvas id frequently described in ways that draw on musical metaphors - critics speak of crescendos of color, lilting lines, dancing rhythms. Conversely, the ranges of polyphonic sounds in musical work are referred to as sonic spectrum, while an emphasis on the lower registers is said to darken the palette of the work as a whole.
But the mysterious affinity of music and art isn’t limited to the realm of metaphor, Artists on both sides of the divide have frequently crossed the line which separates one side from the other. Musicians like Miles Davis, and Debussy attempted to recreate paintings in sound. For their part, many contemporary artists have embraced jazz as a source of inspiration for paintings and sculptures. The smoky clubs where jazz musicians and jazz lovers congregate, the intense concentration displayed by the individual saxophonist or piano player, and even the syncopated sounds which issue forth from their instruments have all formed the subject matter for artists like Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, and Stuart Davis.