Music on the Breeze
18 in x 29 in
1/2026
I intended for this painting to represent air flow, but the background colors ended up a little more saturated than I had intended. Instead of changing them, I left them as they were, since I thought the final piece looked good. I sent a photo of the painting to my daughter with the caption “air flow”, and her response was “I like it a lot, but the background reminds me of a mountain range, and the white shapes remind me of violin music”. This insight resonated with me, and I decided to call the painting “Music on the Breeze”.
The painting can be viewed as a lyrical abstraction of sound carried across a landscape, where repeating white forms behave like both musical phrases and gusts of wind moving over layered terrain. The large, curling white shapes create a strong rhythmic structure, almost like a sequence of musical notes or bow strokes moving in time from left to right. Their repetition with slight variation suggests measures in a score: similar, but never identical, so the eye “hears” a flowing phrase rather than a mechanical pattern. The gentle hook at the end of each form has the gesture of a wrist turning at the end of a violin stroke, which reinforces the sense that these are embodied motions, not just decorative curls.
The undulating bands of pink, rose, slate, lavender, and sky blue evoke an atmospheric landscape—mountain ranges at sunset or layers of distant hills dissolving into air. Cool blues and greys temper the warmth of the coral tones, keeping the mood meditative instead of exuberant, like a passage played pianissimo rather than fortissimo. The white motifs can be thought of as “notes” that float above the terrain like sound suspended in air. Within each white curl, the white metallic internal stroke functions like a shadow or an echo, hinting at the inner resonance of a note as it blooms and then fades. The small clusters of dots trailing some of the forms can be thought of musically as vibrato, pizzicato, or lingering overtones.
Taken together, the work suggests an interplay between environment and melody: music not as something separate from place, but as a pattern that rides the same currents as wind and light.
