The Music of Paint: Odd Music Composed by Colors and Shapes

At first sight, Orlando Leibovitz’s paintings are quite shocking. With their high contrast lighting and warped color palette, the feelings evoked, for me, resemble post-apocalyptic life viewed through the sunglasses of the button-pusher himself.

Sulk no more! Not all of Orlando’s paintings are heavyhearted. Orlando creates “musical paintings” where the music is birthed from the painting itself, serving a bilingual phenomenon for the patron’s consumption.

I was fortunate enough to spend an afternoon with Orlando at his Santa Fe studio discussing his artwork. Orlando usually paints within a narrow color spectrum, only varying from the core by several degrees. His reasoning being that there are less contrasting colors for the eye and brain to “work out,” therefore creating robust and encompassing flavors that are pleasantly harmonious. Orlando wondered if the same concept could be applied to the construction of music. Would the notes hold together like color?

Orlando took his query to the canvas by composing his music visually, based on colors, shapes, and sizes. Each of Orlando’s colorful notes are made up of five qualities.

Color corresponds to pitch, shape is loudness, size is duration, over-bars and under-bars are sharps and flats respectively. Position, along with the other variables, are determined by chance: the roll of a die and the plucking of a card. These notes were then stretched and embellished into listenable art via the musical production pipeline of composer Paul William Simons.

Without the code on the backside, the painting’s auditory reconstruction would be impossible:

Orlando is currently working on a series of paintings representing the accomplishments of several physicists, scientists, and prominent thinkers (Einstein, Archimedes, Schrödinger, Gamow, and others). Check out Orlando’s website for more paintings.

Thank you Orlando for making the world a more interesting place to explore!