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Hello Ngaire
This is an interesting question. So interesting in fact that I had to give myself a few days to sort out all the ideas that went through my head when I first read your post.
I have always been influenced by music, and not always classical, in my painting. I have also been influenced by literature and theatre too. I am very often inspired to express the idea of music in my work but it has been difficult to discover a way of doing that satisfactorarily. I did attempt to do a work on the theme of Grieg's Peer Gynt suite. I had just read Ibsen's play (which actually moved me more than the Grieg music, but you can't read and paint can you?). At the moment I have been thinking a lot about Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado as it is currently being performed where we live. I am most moved to paint something on Yum Yum's song "The Sun and I".
So far, though, my attempts to express these ideas fall very much below the height and intensity of my emotional response to the music. I am trying to get my work more equal to the abstract qualities of musical notes - to get colours, shapes, and contrasts such as vigour and tenderness in the brushstrokes to fore so that I can move away from illustration to a more musical feeling. I do often feel when I am painting well that it is akin to singing.
I have been inlfuenced by the composer Satie very much, and, early on, by the Beatles, and also the Paddington Bear theme and the Wombles (British children's programmes from the 70's), so it all depends on where I am mentally and emotionally (how nostalgic I am feeling or how much I feel I can face the brave new world!).
On a side note, I am, at present, influenced by the books I am reading. Willa Cather's novels brought a bright, yellow sunlight into my paintings, while Faulkner's "Hamlet" turned my paintings more towards a green grey light and shadow. This was an unintended development. I wasn't trying to paint what I read at all. My mood changed naturally by reading these different writers, and the resulting expression was unforced and unexpected and because of this, it made a powerful and convincing feeling in my work.
I don't paint while listening to music, although I have very much done so in the past, listening to radio stations that play classical music so that I don't have to break through my concentration and reverie to turn over or change cd's. I found the interruption of the adverts very irritating, though. And even the music itself became irritating because it often would not coincide with my particular mood - i.e the station would often be garishly dramatic when I was trying to paint something delicate and difficult, which made me too angry without being able to use that anger productively.
The memory of music (and of plays and books) is most important to me because it is with that that the aspects of things that I have assimilated come out in an honest metamorphosis of the original theme.
On a last note, my musical appreciation and ability to play the piano certainly improved when my painting began to mature. I had a much deeper understanding of music when I began to understand what it was to paint like an adult - with larger ideas more encompassing of a universal humanity; or when I began to get to know myself as a human being living alongside other human beings.
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