Smorzando - Fading Away into Silence

Smorzando - Fading Away - pdp1143ct21 - acrylic over paper on canvas - 24 x 36 inches

In this painting from 2021 I made a spontaneous drawing of asemic writing in white on a deep gray background and then with a translucent white glaze highlighted between the lines to pull out forms from the negative space. In this experiment I wanted to maintain a clear view of the original white lines that inform the shapes. I really like how a lot of the white glaze fades into the black giving a strong feeling of depth and Smorzando - fading away into silence. I think I am using that word rightly.

I am starting to look at musical terms and thus the concepts that they embody that composers use when composing music to figure out a visual interpretation of them for my own use in these paintings.

I think of the linear white marks as the actual strike of the notes and the shading and highlighting as the vibrational space created around them. If there are different colors interacting and the glazes of colors pass over each other then that creates a kind of harmonic interaction.

In the last couple of years, thinking about this musical version of asemic writing, I see some interesting possibilities related to spontaneous mark making especially in linear progressions - such as below - on a large scale. My original idea was to think of the dark gray background color as a black board surface as if I am writing a mathematical formulae.

This idea encourages the viewer to see it as a multi line reading instead of an over all painting composition. This idea increases the possibilities of complexity in the work while maintaining an orderly viewing that would otherwise become overwhelmingly difficult to unravel. The little bit of silent space between the lines encourages the viewer toward a linear reading of the work going from line to line. This compositional strategy allows for the idea of moving the eye along the composition in a way that increases the use of time and memory in the reading of it. This gives the ability to play with motifs and variations across the compositional reading.

I have not done it yet, but sections from each line could then be isolated out and used as the basis for ‘blown up’ or magnified and developed individual compositions allowing a painting such as below to become a kind of database or codex from which to take inspiration for creating other future individual works.

The two images above are the same painting. The bottom image is the study of the image in experimental development actually using white chalk but this proved unstable as a base for the painting so I ended up painting a lot of it out as the image progressed. If you look closely and compare the two photos you can see remnants that survived in the more developed version but a lot of the information that I really liked was lost. I would have liked to have kept a lot of the ghost marks of the erasures. Maybe in the future I’ll figure out how to preserve that element.