St. Margaret's Complex Exhibition

The postgraduate students at ECA currently have an exhibition up at St Margaret's Arts Complex, located at 151 London Road, Edinburgh. Any locals are welcome to check out the show, open every day for the next two weeks until 8 May (11-6pm).

Since many of you readers are not local, I am posting pictures of the new paintings that are included in the exhibit. They reflect a somewhat new direction in painting that I have been developing over the last few months. Feedback welcomed!

Inch by Inch, 18x48 inches, oil on canvas

Applause, Applause, each 12x16 in, mixed materials

The pieces reference the influence of sound and music. We seem to have intuitive reactions to hearing songs, melodies and harmonies. We don't necessarily try to interpret or understand them, we feel them or sense them deep in our gut. Is it possible to make a painting that encourages this same kind of reaction from its audience? Anyway, this is one thing I've been wondering and attempting.

I've also been giving consideration to this concept, found in Malcolm Budd's Philosophical Theories of Music and the Emotions (1985):

“Among the various experiences of our senses, tone is the only one that belongs exluseively to life. Light and color, sound, odor, and taste, solidity, fluidity, and gaseousness, rough and smooth, hot and cold, all these are also to be found in non living nature. Only life can produce tones. Living beings out of themselves, add tone to the physical world that confronts them; it is the gift of life to non living nature."

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Can anyone figure out what the two titles have in common? Give up?? Both titles are bits of folk song lyrics. First, there's David Mallet's "Garden Song" (Inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow...) and then we've got a line from Joni Mitchell's "All I Want" (Applause, applause, life is our cause...) which appears on her landmark album, Blue (1971).