When Debora Oden paints, she often listens to music by Erykah Badu or Ella Fitzgerald, finding creative inspiration that takes her own art to a higher level of expression.
“Often, in my studio, I listen to the same albums over and over,” she said. “As I work, I lock myself into a familiar rhythm and body of lyrics that let me lose myself in my visual work.”
Defined by a glorious sense of gilded decay, Oden’s ink and gold leaf paintings are featured in “ArtSounds,” a group show on display at Indigo Sky Community Gallery in Savannah through April 9.
Designed to coincide with the Savannah Music Festival, “ArtSounds” celebrates the visceral, kinetic and creative power of music and features original works by 16 local artists.
Artist Jerome Meadows, who serves as the creative force behind Indigo Sky Community Gallery, says it’s not uncommon for visual artists to be inspired by music in the studio and beyond.
“Music can help you get in tune, feed you and inspire creativity,” he said. “It’s about connecting to an energy flow and tapping into creative energy.”
“ArtSounds” showcases a wide range of media, styles and approaches, from Lind Hollingsworth’s colorful tribute to Jimi Hendrix to Amiri Farris’s cosmic portrait of Savannah jazz bassist Ben Tucker.
Richly layered or elegantly spare, the art on display encourages the viewer to understand that music, like art, is an intensely personal expression. “ArtSounds” successfully conveys a sense of music’s passion, power and influence through a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, photography and mixed media experiments.
Painter Betsy Cain believes music shares an intimate, essential creative connection with art. “Painting holds its own music,” she explained. “It may be internal, but it is there, audible. A good painting plays its music for you.”
In a clever trio of paintings devoted to the creative expression of a sound, Cain invokes a dramatically different color palette and uses radically different brush strokes to illustrate a single ebbing, throbbing musical note in compositions by Thelonius Monk, Muddy Waters and Brian Eno.
Savannah artist Mary Hartman exhibits a series of mixed media paintings inspired by the Arcade Fire song, “We Used to Wait.” Using a light acrylic wash on canvas, Hartman creates loose, dreamy abstract work that delights the eye.
From Judy Mooney’s lifelike sculpture of an African-American musician playing the harmonica to Imke Lass’s high-res nature photography, each of the artists in “ArtSounds” attempts to capture the rhythm, motion and energy of music in his or her own way.
“I love the variety of the work in the show,” said Meadows. “There are very different styles. The idea was to present a diversity of aesthetics.”