Art From Music - Blog Posts

Just learned of the passing of Leonard Cohen and thought I would share this. The painting below, was one I made while at SVA in the early 2000's in Ju Chung's class. We were all given a song and told to make a painting from it. I was given Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song". It was the first song I ever herd from him and only one of two I can still recall ('Hallelujah' being the other). Now, I have no idea what a 'tower of song' is, but I loved the idea of a swirling tower of record pages going up into the sky. Another lyric I landed on was "I was born with the gift of the golden voice" and the sound of the song sounded so morose and dark, and I liked the idea of this golden voice burning like a fire inside this person. And so I painted this. Not a direct, or great interpretation, but merely incorporating a couple of the things found withing.  During class when we had to present our work I remember the teacher stopping at mine and being silent for a second. He then turned and said "I have no idea what this means, but it's pretty cool."