4 minute read
JEMIMA COULTER / FOUR PAINTINGS
ART WALL JEMIMA COULTER
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FOUR PAINTINGS
My name's Jemima Coulter, I’m a songwriter, producer and sometimes carpenter.
Growing up, creating music came second to making things out of wood and drawing, for me, these things feel like the most immediate and dangerous forms of ideas, they are a lot more tangible than music which can feel daunting. With physical objects, the product of your imagination is very much in front of you and immovable, even rubbing out a line isn’t quite as finite as deleting a part on a track. Making things outside of music centres me in my intuition, for example, painting is very low pressure, it allows a space where I can express in limited dimensions with a limited palette. For me, it feels analogous to producing a song. Working with colour and arrangement is like working with time, space, timbre and pitch but with less to worry about. Designing and making things feels like a totally separate skill-set in lots of ways, it requires more structure, planning and accuracy in a way that doesn’t really occur in anything else that I do. But I think pickiness/ precision is still relevant in music making - the brain that trains in on a hit that’s slightly too late is the same one that makes sure my fingers don’t get chopped off. The interesting thing about carpentry is that foresight is incredibly important, problems are always going to occur, but building escape routes into the process can allow for you to easily amend anything you’ve fucked up without it
being too sacrificial in time or materials, this basically involves not committing to any serious details until you’ve 100% worked out all of the structure and joining of everything. I don’t know if I’ve managed to transfer this thinking into music making yet lol.
These four paintings I wanted to share because I mostly paint in order to experience colour and these get to the heart of that, and also because most of them aren't really of anything and so pictures that I wouldn’t deem very good or special - they are just mindless paintings. But I chose them because I felt that one of the key links between any visual art that I do and music, especially painting, is to do with colour and role of colour in art and what I feel like is ‘colour’ in music.
I read ‘Interaction of Colour’ by Josef Albers a few years ago, which is about colour theory - primarily that colour is relative and exists as we see it only in the context of the colours around it. There are lots of illusions in the book where a certain colour placed next to two other colours looks like two different shades when it is the same. This I found really rang true to what I’d experienced in looking at paintings and trying to paint myself - there always seemed to be a disconnect between the colour you were seeing in the thing you were painting and the way it sat on the page. I also think it is to do with colour layering which is a more serious colour theory that I haven’t read about and will maybe get to later in my life when I am painting my way into old age. Anyway, this theory led me to a) start playing around with paintings where the entire point is to play with how colours sit next to each other while creating something vaguely visually harmonious and b) think about frequency as analogous to colour in music.
When I’m creating a song, I try and think about frequency space, where instruments sit in the song in terms of pitch but also length and repeats of the part. The idea is that when you close your eyes, you can hear things in 3 dimensions sitting in front of you and things pop up like little spots of lighter colour and underneath there’s a bed of swirling darker colour that gradually changes through the song with the overall image becoming clearer as time passes. There are flashes of moments moving from left to right and slow progressions in the space. Kind of like you’re inside a painting or a room and the whole thing is unfolding in front of you. I guess thinking about the mixing of the song with an almost architectural quality as well as balancing the music itself. I like to keep a lot of imperfections in my songs because they create moments that only occur once in a track and with the belief that, amongst anything else, I’m trying to create something like a room, the details and imperfections make it a more curious and less predictable space with more movement. It’s the same with adding tiny little specks on a painting or I think one of these has black ends of a match stuck into a yellow blob - it takes it from being a painting that’s up in hypothetical colour space to being one that is grounded.
