"Georgia O’Keeffe was fascinated with what she called “the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye.” Modern artists such as O’Keeffe admired music because it is expressive and can communicate powerful emotions, even when it doesn’t have words or suggest specific images. For Music, Pink and Blue No.2, O’Keeffe was interested in the relationships between music, nature, color, and form.
O’Keeffe used organic shapesand vivid colors to suggest the forms she saw in nature. Soft shapes spread across thecanvas from top to bottom in pink, blue, green, and lavender. The combination of colors and forms creates visual rhythms and harmoniessimilar to those you can hear in music."
(Whitney Museum of American Art website)
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| Photo from artblart.com |
These are fascinating and beguiling ideas, and O'Keeffe's attempt to forge a partnership between the arts is especially appropriate as we approach Woolf's novel. Woolf, of course, variously sought correspondences between both literature & music and literature & painting, and perhaps, like O'Keeffe, between painting & music as well (e.g., I recall scenes in To the Lighthouse -- which LIsa Ruddick understands as "a novel about perspective--visual, spatial, temporal, and emotional" -- describing the rhythmic nature of Lily Briscoe's brush strokes; there's also the lighthouse itself, which suggests, at once, a vertical line (and thus a painterly connotation that connects with Lily drawing her final vertical line in the last moments of the novel) and a rhythmic effect (the dark-light, dark-light revolving of the beam). In one of her essays, Woolf writes that "all great writers are great colourists, just as they are musicians into the bargain; they always contrive to make their scenes glow and darken and change to the eye"; she also describes Keats as "[painting] for lines at a time, dipping his pen in mounds of pure reds and blues." Cool stuff!
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