“My pictures are painted to be listened to…” page 81
Notes from ‘Ivon Hitchens’ Peter Khoroche 2007 Lund Humphries
Connection with music
- …I often use the long shape. A receding movement demands a forward static movement, just as academically one would admit that a quantity of cool colour requires some warm colour to oppose it to preserve balance. This principle runs throughput – dark-light, warm-cool, up-down, in-out. Circular shapes, square angular shapes. Large sobre areas – short quick notes and so on. This all areas pof the canvas should be consciously planned in movements as well as representing objects. But the visual ‘sound’ is of the first and greatest importance. Without it the picture is useless…page 80
- My pictures are painted to be listened to…page 81 What did he mean by this? According to Peter Khoroche, author of ‘Ivon Hitchens’ on page 161, “His hope was that the beholder, on ‘entering’ a picture of his would read from form to form, or colour to related colour, would follow the flow of a contour, or a line, would move inwards by tone colour to tone colour…the eye would be responding to the rhythms od relations deliberately created by the artist – would be listening to the music of the picture.”
- Interest in the music of Olivier Messiaen
- I seek to recreate the truth of nature by making my own song about it (in paint.)
- I try to use a notation of tones and colours so that the design flows from side to side, up-down, and in and out. I am not interested in representing the facts as such until this visual music has been created.
- I often find in music a stimulus to creation, and it is the linear, tonal and colour harmony and rhythm of nature which interests me – what I call the ‘musical appearance of things 9in a way the reality of their soul-essence, if there is such an unpopular thing in this mechanistic age) – rather than their objective solid externals…page 161
- I should like to be able to put on canvas this underlying harmony which I first feel rather than see, and then extract from the facts of nature, distil and later develop according to the needs of the canvas. Page 161
- Michelangelo: ‘good painting is a music and a melody which intellect only can appreciate, and that with difficulty’ …The Art of Florence -essay in Vision and Design by Roger Fry. The idea that abstract art being a type of visual music