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I notice two strong similarities between my likings in art and music, and also in at least one of my favourite television series.
First, I like work that can make me feel like my mind is no longer trapped within my everyday existence - music or art that feels like a separate world based on a slightly different, yet logical, physics. Many individual tracks and paintings do this for me, but it is rare to find this feeling in a whole album, or an artist's whole oeuvre.
Second, I like to feel a strong sense of three-dimensional space, both in art and in music. It is a rare feat for a musician to create such a feeling, but when they do, it can be magical. It is an easier thing to understand in terms of art, but it is still a rare trick to see it done well.
Third, for me, too much balance and tranquillity feels wrong. There needs to be a subtle shading or edginess in there somewhere.
In music, all of this can be done by the use of instrument, of tonal shading, of production, and (in the case of songs) by the lyrics. Few in music have managed to do this as well in my view as Brian Eno, especially in those works where he was straddling the line between rock songs and ambient soundscapes. But many musicians do achieve this, from the high classical to pure pop. If I had to name ten albums or works that achieve this for me, I'd probably name Antonin Dvorak's New World Symphony, George Gershwin's An American in Paris, Brian Eno's Another Green World, Harold Budd's The White Arcades, and several tracks off Paul Simon's Hearts and Bones and William Orbit's Pieces in a Modern Style. I'd add in the Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows and A Day in the Life, and Abba's The Name of the Game, suggest a handful of tracks by Laurie Anderson, and finish off with the anthem from Powaqqatsi by Philip Glass.
In television, the short-lived science-fiction series Sapphire and Steel had a related feeling - an overwhelming claustrophobia, and a distinctly unnerving edge; a feeling that we didn't know everything that was going on, that there was something off-camera that was just as relevant.
In art, my interests centre mainly around the early twentieth century. Many of my favourite artists have the same sense of alien unsettled space as I find in my musical tastes. These artists include Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Delvaux, Caspar Friedrich, Edward Hopper, Fernand Knopff, Edvard Munch, Peter Siddell, Kay Sage, and J.M.W. Turner.
What several of these artists have in common (particularly Sage, Hopper, Friedrich, Siddell, and de Chirico) is a sense of open space that seems to go beyond the canvas, as though you are not seeing the whole of the action, or that there is action is 'off-screen' and we are somehow viewing an incidental part of the scene. These artists produce an incredibly charged atmosphere in much the same way that Alfred Hitchcock produced more terror in his movies than many modern horror movie directors do by NOT showing the action, but by simply implying it. The same sense of unseen foreboding permeates much of the work of my favourite cartoonist and illustrator, Edward Gorey. There is a sense of an unnervingly realistic but somehow troubled empty three-dimensional space.
I have seen this sense of impending action, of a space about to be violated, described in an art book as "The indelible instant". A friend has also described it philosophically when she said that time can be considered as an infinite series of frozen moments, in much the same way as a film is a finite series of such moments. A photograph or painting can capture one of these moments, but may still contains echoes of both the preceding cause and proceeding effects, which occurred or will occur in other moments.
It's a strange sensation I remember from when I was a child, when on a few occasions I wandered through my schoolyard at times outside school hours. The place was empty, but by the sheer fact that I normally saw it full of noisy children, it seemed even emptier than simply having no-one in it. In another way it simultaneously seemed that it wasn't empty — that there was a sort of psychic wellspring of energy or sound or something that came from everyone whom I normally saw there. It felt almost as though it was haunted by those still alive.
Nowadays I like that feeling, even though it is still a little unnerving. It is one of the reasons I like the early Sunday morning radio shows I do at the university student radio station - the town is completely empty, and it throws everything into a new light. I can drive along the main streets at 7.45 on a Sunday morning and not see a single soul, but can feel the presence of every busy Friday night there, trying to break through the surface.
I have been trying to get the same sort of feeling across in a couple of my recent paintings, but I haven't got there yet. I may never do so, but I'd like to. I don't know how much any of this feeling, or the work of the musicians and artists I admire, has rubbed off in my own work, but I hope that some has.