Music Mosaic

"Porcelain" by Helen Jane Long (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c0FBSUd1Hk)

 I first began listening to this kind of music in 2013, my freshman year at BYU. I was learning a lot of things about myself, by myself, and this song reminds me both of who I am today, and what it took to get me here.

"Porcelain" is mostly composed with soft, blue piano cycles, with ebbs and flows of warmer -- yet restrained -- strings. These images try to capture the melancholy and loneliness of the piano, as well as the growth and release of the violins. Overall, I tried to maintain a level of depth within each image; I used several layers of pigment in my watercolors (which medium I thought expressed the "seeping" feeling I get from the song), as well as altered the last three photos I took to further distance the viewer from the real subject. The top two images I did not alter; I wanted to capture the original clarity and intrigue of the opening bars of the song.

The flowers require a little more explanation; I feel that the best way of visually capturing the first moment that the violins come in is with natural movement...either in the spreading and receding of a wave on the beach, or in a flower's bloom. I figured I could manufacture the same sensation with the wet-on-wet watercolor technique of dropping pure pigment onto a dampened canvas. The GIF of my paintbrush touching the wet paper and watching the first rapid, then slow spreading of the yellow was my attempt to recreate the natural, power-then-release feeling of the violins.

I then photographed the final images of my watercolors. Keeping the process of the wet-on-wet technique in mind, the flowers correspond (via their color, size, and placement on the page) to the notes of the violins as they enter and exit the frame.