Deanna Musgrave

I am a painter and multimedia artist interested in the interdisciplinary relationships between the arts, that they can be intermingled into an all encompassing art form, such as Richard Wagner’s theories of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total artwork) or R. Murray Schafer’s Theatre of Confluence. I seek elements in the synthesis of the arts which express universal connections, concepts of vibration, cymatics, or cycles between wholeness and fragmentation.

I communicate these ideas in my work by translating that which is invisible into a visual form, such as music into painting. Through my interest in artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Frantisek Kupka, Joseph Turner, and James Whistler, I endeavor to express commonalities of music and visual art, such as the element of vibration shared by color and sound.

Inspired by graphic musical scores, I have become interested in representing my own musical language or environment through painting. I achieve this by exploring natural and unnatural musical forms, early musical notation (such as neumes), and creating my own motives in response to music. Ultimately, I am developing my own visual/audible language which could be interpreted by musicians.