Tapping Your Potential Through Great Music
With 100,000 hours of listening to music while I painting, I have concluded that ...
I started listening to classical music radio while painting when I was 20 years old, in an extraordinarily dungy apartment in NY's dangerous East Village, East 6th street between 1st and A. I would paint for 16-hours at a stretch, but listening to pop stations was annoyingly repetitive. It drove me crazy. Then I started listening to WQXR, not because I liked the music but because it had a larger scope, and a work had an exponentially longer duration 40 minutes to 2 hours for a symphony or an opera.
A few times a day a piece would attract me, and I would genuinely enjoy it, make a note of the title, and go to a music store and buy the tape. The first one was Bach's Orchestral Suites, famous for the Suite No. 3 in D-major "Air".
Since then I have primarily listened to classical music and opera while I paint. A reasonable estimate is that I have painted 100,000 hours, meaning I have also listened to classical music for that amount of time.
Today I have been listening to Beethoven's Complete String Quartets with Suske Quartet. It seems to me that string quartets and quintets are more subconscious, more introspective than symphonies. And for some reason, they don't seem old to me but are a direct link into the composer's consciousness, in this case Beethoven's.
This recording comprises of 72 Songs, 8 1/2 hours.
The sustained time enables me to focus on the big picture of my painting: not to get lost in details, keeping an awareness of the painting's theme in my consciousness, and making marks that are nuanced, either with power or subtlety.
Great art, music, literature, and etc. are the fundamental key to human evolution of the whole being. They clean up, and discover pathways of our mental, emotional, and sensory network. They also tap our individual potentials. We start out as mini, unformed geniuses, the innate human potential is massive. Strictly on our own, unleashing our potential is nearly an impossible enterprise. Art is the thing that makes this potential feel visible, heard, and loved. That experience and feeling sustains us on our most epic journeys, with the certainty that we can and will succeed.
I am subscribed to Amazon Music, the world's entire music library (with just a few missing exceptions). It works well enough I am never aware of any negative issues. Perhaps audiophiles will know the difference between CD's LP's and digital.
I don't get any kickback for sharing this link, just doing it because it might be a great resource for you.
You can hear the recording on YouTube: