HSBC Cheltenham Music Festival 2–17 July 2010

Painted Quartets

At the 2009 Cheltenham Music Festival — the bi-centenary year of Haydn’s birth — Haydn’s special relationship with the string quartet was celebrated both musically and visually. Alongside a series of concerts featuring eight quartets from around the world, over 20 artists from Gloucestershire and beyond were invited to paint redundant violins, violas and cellos.

Painted Quartets was exhibited during the 2009 Festival at The Summerfield Gallery, University of Gloucestershire and the Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum. A selection of instruments is currently ‘on tour’ in St Ives and Oxford.

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Details about the exhibition

Following on from the success of the Painted Quartets exhibition at the 2009 Cheltenham Music Festival, our instruments are now off on their travels around the UK.

Salthouse Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall: www.salthousegallery.co.uk
12 December – 9 January 2010
Opening times: 10.30am–5.30pm Monday to Saturday (contact the gallery for opening times over Christmas).

Trereife Gallery, Newlyn and Penzance, Cornwall: www.trereifepark.co.uk
Monday 8 February – Sunday 7 March
Opening times: 10am–5pm daily.

Bate Collection, Oxford: www.bate.ox.ac.uk
18 December – 30 June 2010
Visit the Bate Collection website for more information and opening times.

Royal West of England Academy, Bristol: www.rwa.org.uk
Sunday 28 March – Sunday 9 May
Opening times: Mon–Sat 10am–5.30pm, Sun 2–5pm (last admission is half an hour before closing).

You’ll find further information about this touring exhibition on our festival blog and some interesting insight from Meurig Bowen our Music Festival Director.

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Notes from the artists

Painted Violin by Ana Bianchi, Quenington (Gloucestershire)

As a landscape artist, being asked to decorate a violin was a project that both excited and daunted me. Painting an object instead of a flat canvas was going to take me way out of my comfort zone. When I saw the violin, which had been primed to a virgin white state, I immediately thought of the Omega Workshops founded in 1913 by Roger Fry of the Bloomsbury Group whose aim was to remove the false divisions between decorative and fine arts.

I have tried to engage with that spirit and have hugely enjoyed the challenge and process of trompe l’oeil whilst listening to Vivaldi’s ‘The Four Seasons’ to get me in the mood.

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Painted Cello by Felix FLX Braun, Bristol

In approaching my piece for the Painted Quartets series I expressed a preference for a cello, simply because of its scale. My medium of choice is spray paint, used free hand, not stenciled, which makes it a ‘big’ medium not suited to small surfaces.

For my research I explored the cyclical nature of string music — the way the sound produced is heard as a ‘wave’ even though the bow is moving back and forth — and attempted to represent this in an abstract, expressionistic way; whilst simultaneously making the forms sympathetic to — and an echo of — the shape of the instrument.

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Painted Violin by Ruth Crawford, London

My violin is based on the story that, after Haydn’s death two phrenologists took his head for examination to try and find the source of his genius. Apparently head and body were not reunited for another 140 years. I have added ‘Musicality’ to the violin’s fingerboard. And I listened to the ‘Surprise’ Symphony whilst working on it.

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Painted Quartet by PJ Crook, Cheltenham

First Violin

The Fisherman violin makes reference to Haydn’s The Creation through the whale and the fish, but it also relates to Britten’s Peter Grimes which was the first opera I experienced as an art student. It was also performed at the first Cheltenham Music Festival in 1945, five days after its London premiere and formed part of the Hallé’s finale at this year’s Festival on Saturday 18 July 2009.

I’ve always been strongly attracted to the ancient symbol of the fisherman and the sea; evoking tales and legends of old. I often use it as a metaphor for the journey through life itself.

Second Violin

The Angel and the Birds violin is also inspired by Haydn’s The Creation which in turn draws upon Milton and direct quotations, as here, from the Book of Genesis. I frequently use Biblical imagery in my work sometimes as a parallel to contemporary situations.

Birdsong is something that I closely associate with my work as both my studios seem to be surrounded by their music. I’ve made the angel on the front black as they usually seem to be portrayed with paler complexion but some of the most beautiful voices are those of black gospel singers. Once again I first experienced this music as a student.

Viola

On the small viola, like the other instruments exquisite in shape, I wanted to make an image that felt more urban and of now. Not quite the twin towers although they did cross my mind as being one of the saddest images of the early part of this century, but the figures who emerge from these windows make their way upwards to heaven.

I’m also recalling Haydn’s Farewell symphony where the players leave one by one, snuffing out their candles as they go. One of my paintings did perish in the twin towers but thankfully not its owner.

Cello

As I sat in front of my easel I tried to think how ‘Papa’ Haydn might have thought when composing. It seemed to me that at that time during the late eighteenth century he and other creators were preoccupied with the profound. As I contemplated the beautiful shape that the cello made on my easel, the ‘man who walked with beasts’ made his way across my mind. Voyages through the imagination are an essential part of the creative process.

The man’s head is in profile as are the first beasts that I began to make images of. The profile always feels like the most primitive of inscriptions, as in Ancient Greek, Assyrian or Egyptian iconography. There is something mysterious about seeing only one side of a face, not knowing at what he gazes or where his thoughts are focused. Subconsciously I had made reference to Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. ‘The Man who walked with Beasts’ is an evocation of Adam. This indicated to me that my painting on the reverse would be the head and shoulders of Woman [Eve].

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Painted Violin by Bob Devereux, St Ives

I work in St Ives, only a few steps from the sea; so the metaphor of the wave seemed a good one to explore when I painted the violin. After all a violin is a wave maker. The bow sets air vibrating.

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Painted Viola by Anthony Frost, St Ives

I worked on the viola in exactly the same way as I would a canvas — I always paint over the edges of a canvas, so in this way, the viola was really an extension of this — a 3D canvas. To bring my language of shape and colour to the viola, I mummified the whole thing, using hessian, scrim and sacking, using these different materials to create different shapes, and then choosing different colours to fill these shapes.

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Painted Violin by Peter Granville-Edmunds, Cheltenham

From an early age I saw colour in the music I ‘heard’, and the spirituality contained within music. String instruments often, to me, have a somewhat isolated melancholic association. I was given a violin which must have been very much loved at some time, now, discarded and abandoned, having no pegs or strings. Only the frame remained. It vividly reminded me of a photograph I had seen of a bombed and burned out shell of a once beautiful building, just like the violin I had been given. The inspiration for this project was formed.

After removing the household paint and varnish from the once beautiful instrument, I began the long process of transferring the image of the burned out building onto the instrument, which took me 27 hours to complete, working through most of the night in order to (a) beat the deadline and (b) to give the instrument the dignity it rightfully deserves. This concerned me greatly and this I believe the violin and I have together achieved.

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Painted Cello by Mίla Jϋdge-Furstová, Cheltenham

The tones that flow out from a beautiful musical instrument can intertwine with the human soul; each melody resonates in a form of a memory, a narrative or just a feeling. My cello is a metaphor for this. It is a maze of stories intertwined and layered to create different types of harmonies. Some stories are apparent, some are mysteries, some resolved and some unresolved; through them the cello changes from the physical instrument into something less tangible yet real, just like the music it gives birth to.

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Painted Violin by Cath Kidston, London

We chose Rose Sprig as it’s a delicate, pretty traditional print that seems to really suit the violin’s elegant shape. I think that the painted green details really complement the fresh colours of the print, which was inspired by a little dress I wore as a child.

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Painted Viola by Gillian Lever, Cheltenham

My primary interest is in using colour to express a range of basic human emotions. Music that evokes a spiritual realm through the abstract language of sound has provided me with a rich source of inspiration over the years. Paul Klee, an artist totally absorbed by the relationship between painting and music, declared ‘I must be able to improvise freely on the keyboard of colours: the row of watercolours in my paintbox’ (Diaries,1910). I love the suggestive qualities of colour, the intriguing way that it can penetrate the mind and soul. Colour is a secret language with harmonies and resonances of its own.

The cellist Pablo Casals stated that ‘Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic themes to the heart.’ I believe that painting with its magical vocabulary of colour, light and rhythm can also be used for this purpose.

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Painted Violin by Jackie Morris, St Davids (Pembrokeshire)

I thought it would be good to take something from one of the Musicians Benevolent Fund cards, which I have been commissioned to do for a number of years now. Many of the characters in the cards have travelled from one design to another over the years. I have painted on wood before with watercolour, but only small pieces. So for this project I thought it would be interesting to try gold leaf too on this violin.

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Painted Cello by Richard Parker Crook, Cheltenham

It took Meurig Bowen — Director of the Cheltenham Music Festival and commissioner of the Painted Quartets — all of 30 seconds to realise the significance of the words and imagery on my painted cello, so to extend the puzzle further I offer the following:

1. If the difference between Oxford and London is 12 what do you get when you X The Queen with an Archduchess?
2. Why, since there are two hunts is there only one horn signal on the painted cello?
3. Whose seasickness was a result of the judgement of Salomon and how does this relate to the images on the cello?

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Painted Cello by Lincoln Seligman, London

I was delighted to be asked to contribute to this project. Part of the challenge was the absence of parameters. In the end I went for an idea that I hope captures some of the exuberance that is at the heart of great music, and which also embodies the approach of the Cheltenham Music Festival. The pure gold leaf, painted in suspension above the forceful colours, perhaps goes some way to expressing the multi-layered levels of enjoyment that great musical works can give us.

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Painted Viola by Peter Swan, Bristol

My first thoughts on opening the case and seeing an all white viola was to do a Picasso, maybe cubism, or lots of jazzy colour, all rather predictable and not really me. Then PJ Crook, a fellow member of the RWA [Royal West of England Academy] sent me an image of her finished cello that she had treated as just another surface on which to weave her own personal magic, and it was quite stunning. At last I could see a way forward, a connection between my love of ancient trees — either standing or fallen that has inspired me to draw and paint them over the years —and the viola in my hands.

The main challenge was finding a way of supporting the instrument on my easel and being able to work over as much of it as possible in oil paint. I wanted to use the smooth white priming, and the translucent qualities of oil paint, to build up a rich and glowing surface.

I am so glad I took up the challenge, and once on course, I enjoyed seeing my image fuse with the beautiful contours of the viola. I was sad to see it go.