Musical Interpretation – Abstract ExpressionismMany Abstract Expressionist artists, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Norman Lewis, were inspired by the jazz music of their time. Pollock, for example, would often listen to jazz music while making his gestural paintings.

Rhythm is an essential component of music and dance. In the visual arts, rhythm is created through the repetition of visual elements with intervals in between. Rhythm is a good way to create movement in a composition that moves the viewer’s eye through the work of art. Dynamic compositions with movement tend to be aesthetically more successful than static compositions. Think about where you would like the viewer to begin looking at your art work. Scale and contrast are good ways to draw viewer’s attention to a particular place in the composition.

Key Characteristics of Abstract Expressionism

Abstract Abstract artworks do not have defined figures or objects, instead they are made up of shapes, lines and colors.

Movement The expressive sculptural forms and marks on the canvas force the viewer’s eyes to move, giving the viewer a sense of how the artist must have moved as he/she worked.

Expression The artists used line, color, shape, movement and scale to express big ideas, like life and death.

All-over composition There is no single focal point in an Abstract Expressionist painting. Painted areas go right to the edges of the canvas and often seem to extend beyond.

This is a project that asks you to create a design using non-representational art. Non-representational art is full of colors, shapes, lines, values, forms, and textures and has no recognizable subject or objects. Instead, it relies on the elements and principles of design to create a unified interesting composition with directional movement, rhythmic shapes, variety of size, and balance of values and colors.

In this exercise you will listen to jazz music and create an Abstract Expressionist drawing of your interpretation of the music.

Adjectives describing music:Accessible, ambitious, bangin’, blissful, bold, cerebral, clean, delightful, eclectic, ecstatic, epic, exhilarating, expansive, fluid, focused, funky, harmonic, headbanging, heartfelt, hypnotic, introspective, invigorating, layered, limitless, lush, lyrical, moody, nuanced, passionate, piercing, poetic, poignant, radical, raw, relentless, riotous, saturated, seductive, sophisticated, sprawling, stratospheric, striking, sublime, synthetic, textured, throbbing, thunderous, transcendent, transporting, unified, visionary

Norman Lewis

Begin by choosing two adjectives to describe the music:

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Next, select your color scheme and write down the colors you will use before starting your drawing.

Segments of text and artwork for this handout were selected from the following sources: https://www.incredibleart.org/lessons/high/ken-circledesign2.htm and https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/abstract-expressionism/the-processes-and-materi-als-of-abstract-expressionist-painting/

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Create rhythm with repetitoin of marks and color.

Use dynamic lines with varying line weight and value.

Use Nupastel pastel color sticks and colored pencils.