Many painters listen to music while painting. Somehow music builds their mood and stimulate the senses. Some painters even say that the paintings they make while listening to music are richer and can express what they feel better.

This picture on the left is from Artists Network, a work done by Jaimie Cordero of Pinecrest, Florida.

"I created my response while listening to Classical music. Music definitely affects my mood, so typically I paint while listening to jazz, meditative "spa" or "yoga" music, or to my Classical Music collection from India. However, this time I wanted a more active experience and decided to play a variety of Classical music pieces that are complex. I poured the first layer of washes, and while it was still damp, I dropped blobs of mixed yellow—which ended up looking like out-of-focus spots of sunlight. When I felt I needed to even out the warn and cool sides, I sprayed Red Rose Deep. I then direct-painted negative shapes around the palm fronds, varying the warmth, depth, and values as I moved across the painting. As a result, the painting has many layers of color and shape, and gradual transitions of cool, deep passages to warm, bright passages. Thus, Transitions (watercolor on paper, 30 x 22) reflects what I heard and felt. What a great exercise!"

Another statement came from Robert Marshall, the writer of A Separate Reality

I was a painter for many years before I began to write. I now do both. I’ve noticed that, although some writers listen to music while they work, many prefer silence. Painters always have the radio on. Some listen to Bach, some to rap, some to NPR. I know a conceptual artist who listens only to Country Western. Maybe because I started as a painter, the silence in which many writers work is incomprehensible to me. It makes me wonder if I’m not pure enough, if I lack the courage to face the void. I need music, although the music I need when I write is quieter than the music I listen to in the studio. My novel, A Separate Reality, was written largely to Schubert lieder. I am also now more poorly informed about world affairs, since I hear Brian Lehrer less often.

I think this points to a different kind of energy in the process. Writing is quiet, internal. It often makes me sad. Painting is more physical. You use your body more. And, for me, this is sometimes almost unbearably energizing. I can, in the studio, experience a kind of frenzy. In Scorcese’s section of New York Stories, Nick Nolte, playing an nth generation abstract expressionist, flings the paint around while listening to Procol Harem. But I think this frenzy is there for “quiet” painters too (I am one). This has to do with the fact that visual artists (most of them) make objects. Objects that can easily be ruined by one wrong move. A sentence can be rewritten, deleted. A mark can sometimes be erased. Invariably, though, a trace is left. Casual readings of Walter Benjamin aside, in the real world of artists in their studios, there is always only one copy of a painting. There is no backup disk. I know that books are objects too (especially once published). But the real book is internal, in the mind.

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