I've been working on a gigantic project, which will be the topic of a future blog post, I am quite certain! A small subset of the large project was painting this watercolor picture of a violin.

I am still a beginning artist, and still learning about hue and value. As I think about all the things I'm learning in my art class, both from my teacher's precept and through my expanding experience, I marvel at how the music and art worlds overlap.

Value, as any artist knows, has to do with how saturated a color is. Even in a black-and-white piece, a subject will have lighter highlights and darker shadows that offer contrast, so it isn't just monochromatic and flat. In this piece of art, I attempted to vary the value of the browns, even within the body of the violin, as portrayed in my reference photograph. And suddenly, in remembering the precision and experimentation required for such an undertaking, I remembered an audition I once heard from a high school student--a male flutist--who impressed me with the best dynamic contrast I had ever heard in an audition, which easily won him a spot in the youth symphony I helped direct. I realized something: that interest conveyed through varying values in art is similar to the interest conveyed through varying dynamics in music. You can still have a pretty piece in either case with a relative lack in contrast in either value or dynamics, but the depth achieved when employing LOTS of contrast in these areas piques an audience's interest perhaps even more than the soloist or painter realizes and lends itself to a convincing performance or a work of art that draws the viewer in for closer inspection.

Then, reflecting on how I tried to thin my strokes to approximate the fine perfling on the violin edges in my painting, I thought of how thinner or thicker paintbrush strokes is like articulation in violin-playing . . . whether it be strong marcato accents or small, subtle pulses in the bow for a portato bowing. Bold, confident, lengthy bow strokes to achieve a convincing soloistic aura, or barely whispering over the fingerboard for a silky, understated harmony to support other instruments in a symphony rendition.

I love art because it gives me a chance to explore creativity in a low-pressure arena. My lack of knowledge of art masters or art audience expectations helps me experiment more freely and is almost a blessing, despite my acknowledged ignorance and hesitancy as I desire to improve; whereas the passion for violin-playing derived from confidence in the "right way" to approach it can admittedly feed my pride, at least without constant pruning back of unwanted intellectual weeds, but this confidence also holds a positive, self-affirming place. With the violin, I also want to improve, but I know how to navigate my way much more than in art. These two areas of my life: art--a new hobby, and violin--an already-established area of expertise along with its accompanying mostly-self-inflicted high expectations, both have their ways of instilling a hunger in me to refine myself and to keep learning!