convergence

The studio has been a place of experimentation for the last 6 weeks or so.
As I got ready for this festival season with NikCo jewelry I was trying to keep the creative juices flowing. It is one thing to create when you want to and a totally different thing to create when you have to.
One experiment that produced results with which I am rather pleased was trying to visually represent a piece of music.
We all know that music is one of my greatest loves and that is partially because I see it as well as hear it; that is, the music exists in 3 dimensions inside of my head when I listen to it. In trying to describe the phenomena to various musicians we've mostly come to the conclusion that it is a resulting combination of the stereo-dimensional mixing in recorded music and me being... well,,, you know... a bit odd. (fTM Matt said That is so weird; I wish I could hear music like you do)
Anyhoo, there is a short instrumental piece on Thirty Seconds to Mars' new album Love Lust Faith and Dreams called "Convergence". It is a cyclical, percussive piece that really looks cool behind my eyes and I decided to try to capture it on canvas.
It sounds like this.
My intention was to do it with mixed media; I even know what I wanted to use to represent all of the layers, but in experimenting it ended up being all paint and ink.
The full background is the xylophone base painted with gesso and two shades of acrylic blues.
Next is the keyboards, done with pearl, teal, purple and silver paint washes in diagonal swaths.
The kick drum is pearl, silver and teal paint pounced at the bottom.
The guitar is the black pen lines; they are on the canvas where I hear them in spatial relation to each other. There are descriptive phrases written on two of the sides about how I personally interpret the song and I glazed the whole thing to make the colors look wet.
I could go into a lot more detail about each of the layers as the brush strokes, placement, depth, width, color selection and layering all represent something, but I think I've bored enough of you by now so here it is:

the shiny glaze makes it hard to photograph so this is taken in low light; it is much brighter in real life