On the right is my brainstorm of a piece related to music. Music for me is one of the most influential elements for me and my music. I listen to music whenever I can, and can draw many inspirations from it. Some people en-joy music for the meanings and lyrics that are symbolized in the music, but for me, it is all about the sounds, melodies and harmonies. A song may be about heartbreak, yet the tone of the song can make me feel the happiest person in the world. Music is so powerful, able to change my emotions and mood within a minute of listening to it. Able to make me laugh, cry, feel confident, feel like nothing, and the list goes on. This power is incredible to me, not having other mediums to influ-ence or motivate me the same way. I have done artworks about mu-sic in the past before, like a hack of Loui Jover’s style, but it did not truly reflect how I feel music and it’s influences with certain emo-tions. I plan to have the artworks as raw as they can be and have that same motivation to make me feel the same emotion while lis-tening to music. (I do not expect you to read the brainstorm)

Yanni FlorosWhen I did my Loui Jover artwork, I used headphones as a symbol for my escapism when listening to music. Globally headphones have been grow-ing in the music industry and are traditionally a recognisable icon for music. In 2016, people seen wearing these headphones are considered anti so-cial, not wanting to be disturbed and go through the trouble of removing the headphones. Yanni Floros portrays this prejudice through charcoal drawings of women turned away, listening to music through their headphones. Hav-ing drawn the womens’ backs turned, they seemingly appear uninterested in the world around them. With nothing but a white background, the space around the subject makes the women appear isolated and alone, in their own thoughts. The drawings are balanced through the contrast of shadows and light and the darkest focus points of the artwork are the headphones, suggesting that their primary focus is the music they listen to. I chose Floros because they portray how I feel while listening to music. Though they are simple, the artworks appear is strong and familiar to me. Whenever I can, I put my headphones and prefer not to be disturbed. Similar to how these art-works are drawn, when I put headphones on, the world disappears.

Melissa McCracken

Helena Almeida

Synaesthesia is a neurological condition of stimuli and response, and for Melissa Mc-Cracken, music would be translated into colour in her head. Through oils and acrylics, McCracken paints what she colours she associates with songs. Her favourite genre of music is jazz, stating that it is full of rich colours like blues, golds and pearl whites.

“I started painting music just because I would try to explain synaesthesia so many times, it never quite made as much sense as to describe it verbally. So I thought it would be best just to put it on canvas because I’ve always been an artist and it made it much easi-er for people to understand it.”

I choose her to study because of her ability to hear something that, for me, creates so much inspiration. Her vivid colour palette that changes for every song is so extrava-gant and abstract which is fresh and new for me, as I typically see instruments or head-phones when searching up music inspired art. Her style of painting is a very new form, but can only really be done just by her with her condition.

Melissa McCraken, Tonight Tonight, 2014, Painting, Melissa S. McCracken

Helena Almeida, Study for Inner Improve-ment, 1977, Photography, AnOther.com

Helena Almeida paints vi-brant colours onto many of her photographs, forcing the depicted events to seem ma-nipulated and transform the past action or performance into something perpetual-ly ongoing and present. For her known series “Study for Inner Improvement” (1977), Almeida altered photographs

of herself so that she appeared to be manipulating blue paint on the surface of the photographs. In her most famous photograph from the series she seems to be eating the blue paint, a symbolic gesture of domination over a colour reminiscent of Yves Klein’s trademark International Klein Blue.

I have chosen Almeida to study because of her manipulation of paint with her photography. I have always been fascinated with the combination of different mediums and Almeida has painted onto her photographs, stating that it is the connection between the ever evolving present while the pho-tography captures something of the past. Though her meanings of art are not related to music, there is a similar relationship that her being in the photographs have with the paint that I have with music. By myself, I fit in with the world around me and focus on what is physical. But when I listen to music, the emotion I experience feels incredibly physical and drives me through a path of intense feeling. This emotion can be represented with colour, movement, texture, intensity and manipula-tion. I am the subject matter, and the paint is the representation of my emotions within the music. Similar to Almeida’s work, the ‘paint’ can be around me, within me, encompassing me or hiding me, depending on the sounds I hear and feel.

Melissa McCraken, Lucky, 2014, Painting, Melissa S. McCracken

Melissa McCraken, Life on Mars?, 2014, Paint-ing, Melissa S. McCracken

Yanni Floros, Silver Lining, 2012, Charcoal, YanniFloros.com

Helena Almeida, Study for Inner Improvement, 1977, Pho-tography, AnOther.comHelena Almeida, Dentro de Mim, 1977, Photography, AnOther.com