In the works: Diptychs

Among the realizations I came to during my residency was the fact that I couldn’t choose either music or art as what feels “primary” to me. Whenever I would focus on one over the other, it wouldn’t be long before it felt like I needed to balance out with the other form of expression. Furthermore, within visual art, when I was exploring a new abstract direction, I kept feeling pulled back to realism, in what I started to call an “abstract-realism pendulum”. In a similar way, when I began producing more electronic music last fall, I’ve felt pulled back and forth between production and acoustic performance.

People have asked me, “Have you thought about combining your audio and visual practices?” and I’ve explored that; in college I studied film, installation and interactive media as an intersection of audio-visual media. But just as something totally new comes out of the combination of audio + visuals, there’s also something lost, to me, in the blending of what once were separate practices. I’m not against the new forms, but I do feel a pull to honor the parts of composer/songwriter/performer and painter/visualizer within myself, as they are, first.

I’ve decided I want to explore these separate branches of my practice—music vs art, abstract vs realism, electronic vs acoustic—through their juxtaposition, in the form of
”diptychs”. Diptychs (2-panel works), triptychs (3-panel works) and polyptychs (multi-panel works—a term I just discovered on the internet) have always intrigued me when I’ve seen them in exhibitions, and I feel like their plural nature speaks to the way I understand and experience things. We’ll see where these lead…

So far I have two diptychs to share:

1. Musical diptych - ”Wander (Pt. 1 & Pt. 2)”

   I wrote a song for mandolin & voice while reflecting on the end of my travels, and then when I got home, I produced an electronic variation to complement it.

   

2. Visual diptych - “Cardiff Arcade”

   I took a photo while walking through an “arcade” (an alleyway that has been transformed into an indoor shopping/leisure space by overhead glass covering) in Cardiff, Wales. I first painted a realistic rendition, and then created another take—same size, but different medium—focusing on the glass skylight I loved so much about the arcades. This was my first time working large scale with oil pastels & soft pastels—can’t say I love it, but it worked for the medium contrast in this situation. I documented the progress in a series of YouTube Shorts.

   

Stay tuned for a video where I try to explain Yin & Yang and how it relates to my work, since it has become so intrinsic to the way I approach things - including these diptychs.