ILLUS-3638

PICTURING SOUND: MUSIC + ILLUSTRATION

Faculty: Calef Brown

Course Level: Junior, Senior, 5th Year

3 CREDITS

CONCEPTS ELECTIVE REQUIREMENT: This course fulfills the additional concepts elective requirement for Illustration majors.

Illustration, along with painting, printmaking and many other visual art practices, is intertwined with music. The tradition of connecting the visual to the acoustic has a rich history. Illustrators have collaborated on musical videos, packaging and promotion of musical products and events, as well as contributed to graphic novels and picture biographies of musicians and musical movements. Music is often celebrated in a broader and more tactile way than just on a digital screen. We are seeing the enduring inventiveness of the gig poster and the 12” LP cover, still alive as a canvas. Projects in this class will explore promotional, interpretive, and investigative approaches as they relate to musicians, lyrics, and titles, as well as parallels between music and visual art. Students will have the chance to interpret musical works in a number of ways, including through narrative approaches using sculpture, animation and GIFs as well as other less conventional means. There will be an exploration of analogous aspects of music and visual art including: sound and color, time based works, performative aspects and related ideas (e.g.: the movements of the hand while drawing/ painting as analogous to playing an instrument). There will be some focus too, on genres and movements where music and art have close relationships, ie: psychedelia, pop and op art, comics and set designing. Lectures and discussion will also be devoted to learning about artists who create both visual and musical work.