Dear Mark,

I sat with your paintings every day I visited the Tate Modern, while in London. The Seagram Murals. Those monumental paintings in varying shades of deep maroon, red, brown and black. I kept visiting the space to sit there, look and listen. They seemed to resonate with long deep sounds like breathing, humming giants. You said you became a painter because you wanted to raise painting to the level of poignancy of music and poetry. To express the basic human emotions with simplicity and purity. I believe you succeeded.

Most of the time the sound in colour is inconvenient, noisy and dissonant so I tune it out as best I can. It is rare that the sound of a painting only adds to the experience of it visually, but such was the case with your works.

That experience in London stayed with me and last year I began to notate each painting as written music, aiming to articulate the general sense of the sound, its tone and shape and the notes I was able to isolate. The music I hear in colour is tied directly to how long it draws my eye. For instance a two meter expanse of red, that fills my peripheral vision, creates an equal unchanging experience of sound. It is like a choose you own adventure game as the sound changes according to how long you chose to look at something and in what order. Furthermore the application of paint, thin or thick, smooth or rough, effects the texture of that sound, whether it sounds more like that which is shaped by a string or wind instrument. As I was no longer in London I only had my initial notes, memory and reproduction for guidance which naturally changed the shape of the sound.

I created this work on copper for you. It depicts this inner experience of translating your paintings and the sound within, into a written score. Everything solid in the studio dissolves into this internal experience. Into the colour of sound. With the exception of the figure who must watch, listen and write. The score we see is the basic sketch of a musical composition drawn from ‘Red on Maroon’ (1959). I attempt to capture the resonance and the occasional dissonance between the bands of colour as they shifted over one another, floating in space.

I hope you find this work interesting. It points towards something beyond figuration, beyond the surface of the picture plane, as the score is the literal representation of sound. An unheard possibility which can be read and interpreted into it an experience which appeals to the senses and the human heart in a different way.

Yours truly,
Natasha