[...] Curator McBee (of the Morgan Arts Council in Berkeley Springs, WV) says she was inspired to create the show (Visual Interpretations of Sound and Music) while working on assignment for the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She had a vision of a show in which art relates to music.
[...] Laura Hohlwein has sent three 6-foot-tall paintings. Educated both in th U.S. and Europe, she has exhibited in Montecastello di Vibio, Italy, California and New York.
"What I'm most interested in as a painting problem is how to capture in color and form and space a sense of what it feels like to be alive - experiencing the world, responding to the present," Hohlwein said in an e-mail interview. "Music is the most abstract of the arts and, therefore, abstract painting has, I believe, much in common with it."
Hohlwein says she always listens to music when she paints. "...my original approach to painting, laying down the rythmic composition of the work, is almost a kind of dance. As the painting evolves from an active 'drawing' to a developed painting, I devote more attention to resolving spatial and color relationships. I believe the process is akin to a composer's arrangement of sound elements to create harmony, syncopation and resolution.
"Above all, my painting is about the flux of time, space, of a present that is continually renewing itself. I hope someone looking at my paintings will get the feeling that if they come back and look at it again in a few minutes, it will have changed. Of course it won't have. That is the great difference between painting and music. Regardless, I hope my paintings capture some sense of the living, mutable moment and of how as viewers or participants we navigate through that constant dynamic." [...]