Jose Torrado

           Music T'ill I Die

The themes of music and death are uncommonly seen together, but when they are, they focus on remembrance and showing how full of life music can make us. The works in my exhibition are intended to open two types of perspectives. Audiences may feel discomfort when seeing death presented in art or see how music gives us life, even after death. Inspired by the Mexican tradition of "Day of the Dead," all four of my artworks express death as something to be remembered and music something to be appreciated. 

 When choosing the topic for my exhibit, I wanted to challenge myself both psychologically and physically, so I worked with media such as oil pastels, acrylic paint, and mixed media, which I had no previous experience with. However, selecting the theme of death was my biggest challenge. I consider myself a happy individual who keeps a distance from dark topics, but I definitely worked outside my comfort zone trying to find the good in bad with the theme of death. I then thought of something that makes me happy, which is music, and with artworks like "The Old Guitarist" by Pablo Picasso, I could see the positive effects of music on someone's tragic life. 

For my first piece, the skull wears headphones representative of the timelessness of music. Headphones are used for babies to hear music inside their mother's wombs and throughout a person's life. The second and third works are done with acrylic paint and follow the impressionist art style where if a viewer gets close, they can observe the detail of the media, but once they get back, they can see a completed figure. Nevertheless, the skeleton playing the sax presents a more profound meaning representing Jazz and Blues, musical genres derived from oppressed African Americans. Finally, the tomb remembers Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, a piece written before his hearing loss, considered the beginning of his end. 

I placed my works in the order of art style, media used, and complexity, starting with the pilot piece of my exhibition "Music Till I Die" and ending with "La Tumba de Beethoven," which is the only sculpture in my exhibition. My vision for presenting these works of art is to reflect on the connection between music and death, how music accompanies us throughout all stages of life, and to commemorate historical figures in art and music.