Music and Creativity (part I)

I have been fortunate in these past few months to engage in, experience and be an audience member in yet another form of artistic expression: music.

For those of us 'visual creatives' who have always appreciated the strong bond between creating art and listening to music, this post will surely delight.

As educators, my husband and I have embraced the interdisciplinary potential of music and art in the past. However, lately we have truly begun to push the union of these two art forms in the classroom - particularly due to the fact that for the last three years we have had some amazing visual art students cross our path that are also extraordinary performers (you'll read more about that in the post to follow this one (Music and Creativity II/ Sons of an Illustrious Father))...many of which are residents of Nyack, New York, a town whose businesses have really supported young talent.

Still, even when students/artists are not DUAL in capacity of music and art (I'm certainly not), and don't live in Nyack...(I no longer do) the two genres of music and art feed each other so well that the creative process and studio life can almost not be fully realized without it!

So check out this short (around 4min) video I made recently of a few of this year's graduates, including student musician Josh Walteros, as he volunteered time out of his schedule to perform for one of my husband's senior selective figure drawing classes.

I am still always so amazed at just how much music can emotionally move me and drive me to physically create. In this case the students were left not only to study the figure and its inflections in a motion, but to respond to the music in any way they saw fit, even if just embracing color and lines.