Tuning in to the Landscape

How to paint what you see + workshop info & exercises for you to try

This September I have the absolute joy of returning to one of my favourite places, to teach a day workshop at the Pier Arts Centre, Orkney as part of OISF (a total dream to be teaching in this gallery & space, which many of my art heroes have graced.)

The workshop is going to be based around responding to landscape: what we see, what we hear, and how this in turn makes us feel.

In this post, I wanted to share some of the processes and approaches we will be exploring, so that if you can’t make it to the in-person event, you can have some ideas to try yourself at home.

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Backstory

Before we get to the prompts, I wanted to share how this workshop came to be!

If you’ve been following along with my art practice for a while, you may already know of my love of visualising sounds from nature, or music. Originally, this stemmed from putting two of my loves together: playing music, and making art. It somehow made sense to start drawing what I listened to, and I quickly found that drawing these sounds actually helped me listen better: be that to my environment, or to the music I’d play or enjoy hearing.

This workshop has stemmed from Sagas & Seascapes - a collaborative project with Nordic Viola (string & woodwind ensemble run by viola player Katherine Wren) back in 2022. Their focus is to explore, commission and perform nordic stories, folklore and landscape through contemporary classical composition, and to tour this music in rural parts of the North Atlantic region.

My role in this collaboration was to create a series of original paintings which tour with the music, and featured as part of a documentary, designed as a digital performance to share during pandemic lock-down restrictions (and later premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.) This evolved into designing the artwork for their album, featuring the paintings from the project to compliment the program of music.

How to draw Sounds: 3 prompts to help you visualise what you can hear

Drawing something you can’t see might initially seem difficult, but in reality, there are no rules, rights or wrongs: it’s all about interpretation and the results are limitless!

Instead of thinking about ‘drawing’ sounds, we are going to make marks instead. Instead of your usual line with a pencil, mark-making opens up a whole world of textures, line qualities, shapes…and you can use any material or tool to draw with - it doesn’t have to be your usual pencil or brush! More info on mark making at the bottom of this post.

My three prompts for you are:

• If sound could be a colour, what colour would it be?

Colour is closely linked with emotions. To explore sound through colour, listen to the music / sounds. How do they make you feel? List out a few emotions that arise. If these feelings could be a colour, what would they be?

• If sound could be a line, what line would it be?

To think about line, I often think about melody or pitch. When sounds get higher or lower, I move the line up or down to echo this movement. You can try this for yourself by placing your drawing tool on the page. When the melody goes higher, pull your tool upwards, and lower down: Don’t take you tool off the page, until you reach the other side. You will probably end up with a wavy line if your music has a variation of highs and lows!

• If sound could be a texture, what would it be?

To visualise texture, we need to think about how the music sounds: is it gritty, smooth, soft, jagged, bumpy, flat? When you have an idea of the texture you can hear, it’s time to visualise it. How can you make a mark that is soft, smooth, bumpy etc? Remember there are no rights or wrongs, and these marks don’t need to ‘look’ like anything.

Top Tip: These drawing ideas work in all sorts of landscapes; from cities, to seaside. The longer you listen, the more you hear, so make sure to sit for a few minutes and let your ears adjust - you’ll find all sorts of interesting sounds to respond to!

Sweet, but how can we use these colours, lines and textures in art?

I gather all of these elements, and incorporate them into my landscape paintings; as demonstrated in the Sagas and Seascapes paintings made for Nordic Viola. I like to combine them with literal elements of landscape - such as the standing stones or sky - to capture a sense of both the place and the music or sounds.

In the in-person workshop we will be exploring how to combine these elements all together, and weather permitting, head outside to sketch from the local landscape in the morning, to combine what we see and hear together in the afternoon.

Video Demonstration:

Check out this video, where I share some of my sketching to sounds process outside:

Free Mark-Making Video Tutorial:

If you’d like even more ideas for how to draw sounds and get more experimental, you might enjoy my free mark making tutorial: this shares the basics of mark making, and some of my favourite non-conventional tools and processes.

Workshop Details:

Date: 11th September 2024

Time: 10.00 - 4.00pm

Location: Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney

Tickets: https://oisf.org/fest-event/workshop-painting-to-sound/