58-59 Picturing Rhythm

Picturing Rhythm

By JACK KARP It is 9:30 on a Monday night at Los Angeles’s world famous jazz club, The Mint.

Spectators are restless in their seats and the buzz of anticipatory chatter fills the room as show time approaches. A man enters and sets up his equipment. But he is not a musician; he is artist Steven Lopez and he is about to paint “live” to the music of the Kevin Kanner quintet.

“Ever since I started drawing I always had music in the background. It had the power to build the atmosphere that I needed,” Steven says. “It was only a matter of time before I started merging the two.”

That’s exactly what Steven has been doing. Starting out as a graffiti artist on the streets of L.A. opened Steven to hip-hop music and “helped expose me to the sampled artists, and I followed the trails into jazz, rhythm & blues, and be-bop,” he says.

Though he has since moved from painting on alley walls to acrylic on canvas, the echoes of that music still vibrate through Steven’s paintings. Images like The Rabbits make me feel pensive... illustrate the repetition and rhythm that cycle through his work, much the way hip-hop’s heavy bass lines move through the music that inspires him.

In images like In between her and Wreckless harmony, which was the first of this series made between 2006 and 2008, figures not easily discernable from the background of color and shape emerge, much the way lyrics and rhymes emerge out of the syncopations of rap. And like the DJs who are constantly sampling other musicians, Steven often samples other artists, grafting images from science fiction, comics, and pop culture onto his work. In surrealist images like The crime of difference is eclipsed by the power of self-realization, Steven appropriates imagery from as far afield as Salvador Dali and sci-fi animation.

But it’s in his After Midnight series that Steven’s marriage of music and painting culminates. In this, Steven attempts to evoke specific hip-hop and R&B performers like Erykah Badu and Aretha Franklin in a way that echoes the mood of their music. “I started the project because I wanted to document my painting process via time-lapse photography,” Steven explains. “I thought that 58 • Fine Art Magazine • Fall 2009

music was going to accompany the footage.”

So Steven began videotaping his process as he painted to the music of the performers he was capturing. “It took less than a minute to realize that I should use the canvas in direct response to the song that I chose.”

Steven is only one of a number of artists increasingly working across disciplines as a way of evoking rhythm and sound in his visual art. Like him, Erika Kapin is a visual artist who finds inspiration for her photography in music and vice versa.

“Light and sound both come from vibration,” the New York-based photographer and violinist likes to point out. “Something that is audible has a color to it, and something that is visible also has an audible sound.”

Erika began her artistic life playing jazz violin, “although visual art was always present in my life.” After several years performing music, she began feeling compelled to express herself visually. “I do feel that they are very related in how I use them and in the creative process.”

Erika takes inspiration for both art forms from the other. “In playing music, I often will visualize a color and focus on playing that hue,” she says. But it is in her photographs that the influence of her musical background really shows. “The photos I take attempt to draw parallels between music and life. Rather than a specific photo being taken to evoke a certain music, an image is intended to convey the relationships between sound, light, and how it relates to life as whole.”

Her image, Urban Pulse, for instance, illustrates the repetitive rhythms of the city she calls home, as commuters pass the camera over a period of time while one stationary figure seems to be the uneasy element in the multitude of frames. The

Erika Kapin, Urban Pulse

Steven Lopez, In Between Her

highly stylized geometric structure, with a single figure consistently reappearing in various places throughout, evokes not only the structured urban grid of the city, but also jazz’s familiar underlying repetitions that contain improvisations within them. Erika takes a different approach in Echo, seeking the visual equivalent of an audible reverberation in the movement of a visual form through space. Looking at the image, one can almost feel the figure depicted vibrating like a bell that has just been rung.

Yvonne Murphy is also an artist who draws inspiration for her visual art from the rhythms and repetitions of sound. Only the rhythms that drive Yvonne come not from music, but from poetry. A published poet whose work has appeared in literary journals like Poetry and Borderlands, Yvonne started creating sculpted books as visual art in 2004.

Originally, the books were a separate form of expression, intended to “manifest personal dreams and visions,” Yvonne says. But inevitably, the two art forms began to mingle. “I started using my poems in some of the books — like Poetry Book and Silver Book. In those, I cut out some of my poems and put them in pockets inside the books.”

Yvonne continued sculpting books as a way of crafting physical representations of specific works of poetry until the books themselves began to fascinate her. “I became more and more interested in the book as a physical entity,” she says, and in 2007, Yvonne went to Ireland to study the Book of Kells and other

rare manuscripts. The trip was an epiphany and led to Yvonne’s creation of Scarred Book. “I was just as transfixed by the skin – stains, marrings, patches, and scars – of that manuscript as I was by the transcendent art and script.”

But something else happened during her biblio-immersion. For the first time, not only was Yvonne inspired to create a book, but “I began writing poems about books,” she explains, like in these fist lines of her poem Covered by Forest: “The book is full of language, hybrid monsters interlaced in hedgerows/ of alliterations, peacocks, gargoyles, griffins. Twisted into verbal knots…”

Bibliomancy, Yvonne’s second manuscript of poetry on which she is currently working, “is a fruition of this back and forth between art and poetry and all things book,” Yvonne remarks. In her poem, Kermes Red, a reference to the dye made from insects used in ancient manuscripts, Yvonne’s obsession with those intricately designed manuscripts is evident in her use of baroque language as well as in the poem’s almost archaic structure: Cr imson wingless insects, your pregnant bodies the color of Antiquity inked on European cedars, the Middle Ages, your bellies scraped for vermiculum by meticulous fingernails.

You shift into a potent scarlet dye used in medicine, tabernacles, courts, our most sacred books…

By now, “the interconnection of my sculpted books and poetry is relatively symbiotic,” Yvonne says. “Everything kind of happens simultaneously now. Sometimes poems get written first and sometimes books start getting made first. I’m usually working on them at the same time.”

Karen Johnson, also like Yvonne, is inspired by the rhythm of words. A photographer who grew up in the rural Midwest hearing stories told by her elders, she became heavily influenced by the “rural oral tradition.” Karen now incorporates the language of those stories into her photographic images.

“Sometimes I write on the image,” she explains. “Sometimes I use a high contrast film to make a photographic image of the text and then print it as a separate image paired with or printed on the image.”

Karen creates large installations of images and artifacts combined with text, and her work tends to be narrative, mining her

family’s rural past and storytelling heritage for material. “The process of making my work is often very personal, motivated by a drive to understand personal experiences and concerns,” she says. She usually writes her own text, though she sometimes appropriates text from historical documents or songs.

In Dad Never Told Me, for instance, she places her grandparents’ aging wedding photograph at the center of the piece, with handwritten copy documenting all the family secrets her father kept swirling around the image in concentric rings. While in Fish Story, she transcribes a tale she recorded her grandmother telling about the very big fish caught by the farmer who lived across the road from her directly onto the image of her grandmother.

The result of this process is “the creation of new images which are, in a sense, poetic responses to the original images and to the stories they awaken for me,” Karen insists.

This need, to somehow respond visually to the audible rhythms of life, whether those rhythms come from music, poetry, or stories, seems to be the driving force behind the work of all these visual artists, artists who listen as well as simply see.

“The process and goal of art and creativity are very much the same regardless of the means,” Erika Kapin says. “Vibration, light and shadow, rhythm and motion, form and shape – all of these elements which together form art and music, also are building blocks to life.”

Erika Kapin, Echo

Steven Lopez, Badu

Yvonne Murphy, Silver Book Fine Art Magazine • Fall 2009 • 59