Stephen Ellis (b. 1951, USA)
Untitled (SEVL-12-5), 2012

That’s how I see my music. I don’t really have language for it, and this vision is not music. I think that I think in thoughts, not words or images (although they are often parts of thoughts), so any attempt to express something in either is bound to be a rough approximation. I am weighing the words I could use to map my musical experience onto this painting or the other way round, but it is not working. I am testing “parallel themes” as descriptor for the sonic equivalent of the lines in the image, but what I “hear” is not exactly “themes”, it is more “sounds”, but not static sounds but rather some element of the soundscape that I (or that little green man in my brain) choose to follow as something distinguishable, but that might be distinguished by me only arbitrarily and indistinguishable for anybody else – I don’t know, I cannot point it out, I cannot describe it, I cannot isolate it… But somehow what I see in Ellis’ painting correlates with what I tend to see “in my head” when listening to sounds. And it is not a case of synesthesia either, what I can tell, as I do not have particular match between colours and pitches… it is more about structures…

I don’t do this kind of paintings. But in some inexplicable way this painting seems pertinent to my sonic practice. Maybe I should try painting it too, some day…

PS It is quite interesting that Ellis titles his works as “Untitled”, but then adds some code that, I believe, must be a way to identify any particular Untitled. That’s quite an interesting solution. I am thinking of ways to obscure my authorship of my works without making them irreferrable. Maybe there is something to learn from Ellis even if his system is not for the authorship but for particular works…