Melissa Griffin

Profile

Age: 35
City: West Palm Beach
Country: United States

Joined: Jun 2009

Hello and thanks for visiting my world of imagery! While growing up and as far back as five, I felt a definitive direction towards the arts and music. As a teenager in the early 1990’s I could think of nothing else that i could love more than to create as much art as one could and to dream up as many songs that life would allow… Today my dream is alive and my body of work growing exponentially!

Currently I am exploring painting in many styles, including abstract landscape, high textural abstract studies, Art Nouveau inspired female studies. I use many mediums in painting, mostly using acrylic, oils, ink and charcoal on canvas, wood, or clayboard. I am inspired by the female form and how it was approached at the turn of the century through both painting and photography. Click Here for a link to my website.

I also see photography as one of my truest passions and understandings. I strive to capture beauty in all of it’s forms. Sometimes destruction of reality proves to be more beautiful than what “is”. Sometimes what simply “is” surpasses unseen divinity. I strive to create sublime spaces and love to capture nature’s raw appeal, untouched and up-close. I feel what I capture, and these feelings are frozen in time along with place and subject. What other medium can stop time in such a way for all to experience and enjoy?

Born with a visual, almost tangible sense of sound and music, I have recently explored the medium of painting in order to visualize the music I hear and compose. As I hear musical tones, I simultaneously see these tones as short, heavy lines or long, thin linear shapes. Singular notes can evoke particular colors. I used to ask myself what shape or color a song was when i was a child, and thought that everyone had this same sense! Check out my music

I have explored the visual aspects of sound in my past movements towards abstraction. I can relate the way in which the music was produced to the way that the painting was created. The emotions that are evoked when I listen to music are something that I can visually capture, as well as what i believe the song to “look like”.

Musical tone can be recorded through color, line, form, size and shape with great veracity. The smoothness, the wet glide of the paint onto the stable ground is very much like the digital recording and playing of different instruments in my music studio. As I play any given instrument, I simultaneously can watch the sound waves and midi notes being recorded realtime through audio recording software. This software has enabled me to see all of the layers of sound, one on top of another like never before. It has helped me to break up songs as a whole, visually in my mind.

When I listen to my own recordings, I am able to visualize each layer in juxtaposition to the one created before it. I recall the order and harmony of the song like a visual timeline. Some of my songs have had as many as seventy layers, or tracks of instrumentation.

I approach song making and painting in the same manner. Building layer upon layer without any preconceived outcome, until it satisfies my soul making me feel in complete harmony…This is how i approach both mediums of expression. Implementing different audio effects onto each instrument to change it’s tone or quality is very much like building upon an original form in a painting, either by applying a glaze, building up thickness, or changing surface texture by using different methods. It is fascinating to me to watch a painting continually change and evolve, to know what it started as, to know what lies beneath all of those layers of emotive reaction. My partner must sometimes tell me when to stop, when to move on to the next canvas. I think i must create about five paintings on average, all completely different from the next, on one canvas. Each painting reminds me of all the past images that hide beneath the layers of painted mystery.

In regards to my synesthetic work, the paintings often contain many layers that tell a story of how the music was born. I would like to capture these layers through photographic documentation to demonstrate this concept. This concept relates to my experience in my recording studio. I can continually remix and add layers to any track that I wish, until I am satisfied. I can go back in time to hear the song at any given era of its evolution. I am attempting to spontaneously capture what I hear and feel through using paint, combining auditory and visual senses. It would be optimal to showcase my works of art in company of the music I produce. I also have dream of creating a visual/auditory experience through video imagery, capturing the many stages of a single painting in synchronicity to its inspiring song.

Featured Artworks: