Kasey Loomer

University Honors with Honors in Studio Art

Majors: Studio Art

Supervisor: Edward Irvine, Art and Art History

Visual Music: The Synaesthetic Relationship Between Visual Art and Music

Beginning in the 19th century, visual artists and musicians have worked towards reaching the goal of unifying the visual and auditory senses synaesthesia in order to create “Visual Music.” To achieve this, the art forms must be in purely abstract form, breaking free from the tendency to create preconceived ideas according to symbolic references and representational narrative aspects. This allows visual art and music to be analyzed solely on their formal characteristics, rather than the subjective emotions they may convey. Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky are two of the main visual artists who experimented with synaesthesia in their work, using musical terms to describe their visual techniques. According to their findings and other well known artists’ experiments, structure created through the use of light, pattern, rhythm, gradation, movement and transparency continually bind the foundations of both art forms. Visual artists strived to create a sense of “cool romanticism,” where structure and expression meet. The aspect of time remained a factor in finding true transition. Music is experienced through time, and can be heard from any angle. More recent visual mediums such as installation art and digital media have overcome this obstacle, where the visual can be experienced from any angle as well, ridding the work of being simplified to one image in a fixed gaze. My project incorporates the experiments of some of these artists and some of my own into a collection of artists’ books.