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| Roger Dean's Cover for the LP "Osibisa" |
I know, this is supposed to be a blog about painting and, specifically, about plein air painting. But the main concern of plein air painting, the landscape, doesn't belong to this art form exclusively. As a long-time lover of the landscape, I've discovered the same beauty in many of the arts. And most importantly to me, in music.
Like many people my age, music was a vital aspect of college. Who didn't have a stereo system that occupied more auditory space—and, sometimes, more physical space—than anything else in the dorm room? When I was a freshman, my roommate had an embarrassingly small stereo, tucked up in an overhead closet. He had a bucket list of all the popular albums that he wanted to buy and tape. He played each LP exactly once to record it to cassette tape, and then he put it aside, listening thereafter only to the tape, thus keeping the actual LP in near-pristine condition. Because his list was long, my education in popular music of the 70s was comprehensive. Elton John, The Eagles, Bad Company, Pink Floyd—well, it was a very long list.
As the months passed, I made other friends, art students, who were into more alternative music. (One's musical taste was a political badge; you could learn a lot about a person by the music he listened to.) Patti Smith, the Ramones, The Cure, Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa—not as long a list as my roommate's, but it was growing. Having alternative tastes myself, this music appealed more to me than what the fraternities were blasting out their windows on weekends.
But I've always had eclectic tastes, so over time, my LP collection swelled to include a little bit of everything. (Yes, even Elizabethan consort music.) Because my high-rise dorm was a veritable Tower of Babel of music, I finally bought a stereo with headphones so I could listen to my music and not my roommate's or the neighbors' down the hall. Besides my studies, I also sketched a great deal, and this was always to the accompaniment of music. Some music I found to be better than others to sketch by—and this was music that evoked a landscape.
Some of this music I might call representational art, as opposed to non-objective. Albums like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here contain samples of actual noises—cars speeding up and driving away, for example. These speak immediately of real landscapes. Others, like Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, are more abstract yet still conjure up a landscape. Tubular Bells is peripatetic, a stroll (sometimes a mad dash) through an incredibly varied world. And although Yes, for me, doesn't create a mental landscape, the stunning LP covers of fantasy landscapes by Roger Dean are magical in the way they help the listener project the visual onto the musical. The covers have nothing to do with the actual music, but while listening to the album and studying the art, my imagination welded the two together.
Some of my sketches made to music were pretty wild, I remember. I'd love to share some of them with you, but a search through my archives proved fruitless. So instead, I encourage you to slip on a pair of Koss Pro 4A headphones, throw Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans on the Technics direct-drive turntable, crank up the Garrard amp, and sketch your own worlds.
