When we look at artists and their friends, sometimes its because, in each of their realms, the artist and the composer may have similar stylistic thoughts. In other cases, however, the works of the two artists may be completely opposite.

In my article When the Ear Meets the Eye, I mentioned how music and visual arts have collaborated throughout the years, and particularly how composers have taken inspiration in works of visual art to create their own musical works. I

It’s one of the most dramatic of American paintings. On a large grassy field, a woman sits on the ground, turned with her back to the viewer, facing a rolling hill. Her body is twisted, her left hand in front

Flailing and falling, so Icarus descends from the skies, having melted his wings in the heat of the sun. In this landscape, we see life going on and then, in the bottom right corner of the work, the legs of

Pieter Bruegel’s enormous painting Children’s Games is 118 x 161cm (46” x 63”) and throws us into the middle of a complicated street scene. Over 200 children play over 80 different games and we approach it with our modern eyes

Music is, to many people, very abstract. It is the only form of art that is a language of its own, and oftentimes it is difficult for the common listener to understand the true message of the composer without a

Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), was a leading painter in the Harlem Renaissance. In 1934, he created a 4-panel mural for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library. This branch later became NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black

At what must be regarded as one of the most well-known painting exhibitions in music, Modest Mussorgsky’s 1874 piano work Pictures at an Exhibition takes the listener around a gallery of his late friend Viktor Hartmann’s paintings. Hartman died in