Descending, Reflecting, and Ascending

Julie Caves

Interview by L. Valena

You included this great write-up, which I'll include, but I just want to go through this with you. First, can you tell me what you responded to?

In the music, most of the notes felt like individual things- like drawing marks. I hadn't thought of it before, but I guess I was seeing them as individual things, not like an orchestra. It was almost like every note was played individually, so it made it easier to think of the marks I would make with a brush. So there were lots of long notes, that either went up at the end or sunk down at the end, or had little pops. Long note, short note. I don't usually paint so much with lines, but ended up thinking about all those long notes as lines I guess.

Can you talk some more about what it was like to get this piece of music for the first time, and take me through that a little bit?

I’ve noticed something about music. A piece of music that was really important to me ten years ago, something that gave me chills in the past- if I listen to it again, I can have that same experience. If I listen to it ten more times, it doesn't come from the past anymore. It becomes part of now, so it goes with whatever I'm doing now. I assumed that would happen with this piece. That the first time I heard it would be really different from subsequent listens, so I was really careful with the first time I listened. I listened to fifteen or twenty seconds and then I stopped, and I spend a lot of time thinking about painting. So that I could sort of be ready to hear it the first time. I pictured the marks I would make, and the colors that I would use, and got everything prepared, so the first time I heard it I was ready to go.

It sounds like you were really trying to carry that first experience of hearing the piece, and kind of savoring that. And trying to capture it somehow.

Yeah. And because I knew that subsequent listens would be a little different, I wanted to capture those as well. So I started out thinking that I would make three paintings. That they would be kind of first impression, and getting to know it, and now that I thoroughly know it- something like that. That's not what ended up happening, but that was my plan.

How did it end up happening?

I was all over the place. When I listened to the piece of music, just doing that, doing nothing else (sitting in a chair, at home, listening to the music) it lasted a full three minutes. And it had lots of different parts. When I listened to it with a paintbrush in my hand, making marks, it flashed past. I couldn't grasp it, and I could hardly hear it. It was so strange. I think that the part of my brain that paints might also be the part of my brain that listens to music. So my brain was trying to really seriously pay attention to two different things at the same time. And that's supposed to make moments last longer, so I'm not quite sure what happened.

It's not very logical, how time works, is it?

No. Everything about this experience was unexpected. Nothing is the way I logically thought it would be. It was really, really interesting.

Have you ever done something like this before?

No.

I love that you had these kind of ideas of what this would feel like, based on the rest of your life experience. It doesn't seem like it should be different from all the other stuff, right?

Yeah. I choose the sounds in my studio based on things that are usually quite familiar so that I can listen to them without having to pay too much attention to them. Things that assist me in painting. But paying so much attention to this piece, and letting it into my head, it felt vulnerable. It was like I had this strange creature in my head! It was really such a strange experience.

I love that word 'vulnerable', and the idea of this creature. Can you say more about that?

It was something foreign that I let inside. And I gave priority to it, and tried to translate it into painting. I don't really know- it was odd.

Do you think that the force that you felt come into you, do you think that you put that into the paintings, and that it's there now? Or is it something different?

I don't think I translated it as well as I hoped. I ended up finding some solutions. Lines and snail trails. Contrast. Things that I felt approached it, but I think I could do it for the rest of my life, just trying to solve it. Trying to figure it out. It was really good that I had a deadline, because this is the kind of thing that I could just keep doing until I got it. I mean, I got something, but I don't think I got everything I could have. I don't want to say the right thing, I got what I could get right then. But I'm not sure if I'm capable of this, or if it's possible- or if I believe that something different could happen. But if I listened to it a thousand more times, and made a hundred more paintings, I would get to another place, but I don't know if it would be a better one, or not. Maybe.

It's so interesting. I'm reminded of those photographers in the nineteenth century that were always trying to photograph spirits. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Yes. I was surprised by what you said a minute ago- I know I said creature, and I think when I wrote about it I said alien. But it's not really that- I'm not really thinking of it that way. Because I've never lost sight of the fact that another artist made this. Part of the experience of listening to it, when I was just listening to it at home, was I don't know if I imagined it, or if you could hear people shifting and rustling around- the musicians. There were a couple of moments when I felt like I could hear someone's chair squeak or something. It didn't sound like synthetic music. It sounded like someone had a clarinet there, and they were making unusual sounds with it. Almost like playing with the instrument, to see what it could do. A lot of it is quite discordant. I didn't actually think of the music as a full body, the way that maybe I had been talking about it. It felt a bit like the activity was doing something different in my brain, which was unsettling. It was just different from what I usually do- so much so that it felt really foreign in my brain. It still sounds crazy, doesn't it?

No, it doesn't sound crazy at all.

I wasn't looking for fairies or something.

No of course not- I think you're elucidating something that's really hard to talk about.

This is why I'm kind of disappointed in the paintings. In the end, they're just lines and colors. So I can't talk about it, and I can't seem to paint about it. I think I can paint about it, but maybe not. I think it's taking words to talk about part of it, and painting to talk about the other part of the experience of trying to paint sounds in my head. If you had the music there as well. Maybe words and the music and the painting all together might convey some of the experience of trying to do this thing.

It's pretty wild stuff. We've been working on this for a couple of years now, and it's all based on the exquisite corpse- a parlor game that the Surrealists co-opted back in the day. There was an essay that this art critic wrote like a decade after the Surrealists had there way with the exquisite corpse, that just posed the question of why they walked away from it so fast. They were really into playing this game, and then they stopped, and nobody will talk about it anymore. What is it that they experienced that was so weird that it made them stop? I think when you get a lot of artists building into the same work, there's some kind of spooky stuff that happens. I think you're picking up on something that is totally there. It's not wacky, it's just hard to express.

Exquisite corpse is really interesting, and the way I've experienced it is the folded paper drawing. I was also thinking about the child's game where you pass a phrase around a circle. Someone says a phrase, and it's so fast and in such a whisper that it gets misheard by the next person, until it gets all the way around and becomes something completely different. I was thinking about that, and reading one of the threads on the Bait/Switch website. How it started with two scents, and then for the next several works people were making work about bathrooms. I thought that was amazing.

Is there anything else that you want to talk about? About the experience or about the pieces that you made?

One of the other, unexpected outcomes only lasted a day or two. I started hearing everything. It was like I had been making my ears really work, and that phenomenon stayed around a couple of days. I heard things that normally I wouldn't have paid attention to, and that was an unexpected outcome. I thought that was interesting. In my daily life I would just notice thousands of sounds around me all the time.

I loved the way that you listed them all in your notes. Because you're right- we hear so many things all the time, and so much of hearing is just identifying what those things are. Identifying is such an interesting part of hearing. Like right now, outside there is this sound that I haven't really thought about what it is until right now. It's the sound of someone hammering something. Someone is hammering something, somewhere in my neighborhood, and it's adding this interesting little rhythm to things.

But you didn't register it until you could identify it with words, is that what you mean?

I think so. Or I didn't really think about it, until there was that moment where I thought, "what is that?"

Identification. Yeah. I sat down right when I got to the studio and remembered everything, or I probably wouldn't have had that trail of things I heard. I also did see most of them- I turned to look to see where that sound had come from, to help me identify it. I probably wouldn't have remembered that whole experience, except that I sat down and wrote it all down right when I arrived.

So that phenomenon lasted for a little while.

Yeah. For a couple of days I was paying more attention to sounds than I had before, because I had been working that muscle. Maybe it does have something to do with identification- that's really interesting. I was trying to find something visual to correspond to a sound I was hearing. I was trying to visually identify it maybe, but I wasn't giving it a name. Well, sometimes I would give things names- I would say 'swooping', and 'descending', 'rising', 'screeching'. There were all 'ing' words. But I think I was also trying to give it a visual identity, and so maybe that identification of "oh, it's someone hammering." I was in the habit of trying to identify sounds, so I started doing that in my daily life.

I also think it's interesting to think about how you were experiencing the music in real time. Like how you were trying to hold onto the moment, and paint from the music in real time. I've been trying to stay in the present moment lately, and I've noticed that there are things in the present moment that I may not have noticed if I wasn't here. So I wonder if that's part of it too.

That makes a lot of sense. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I'm going to do next. And if eliminate that, then your brain needs to think about other things. And if you're trying to thinking about all the things that are happening right now, there are actually a lot of things happening right now that you could pay attention to. But it is not a normal experience.

Do you have any advice for someone else doing this?

No. I think someone else would approach this a different way than I did.

Is there anything else you want to say about this?

I hadn't intended to say that my paintings were crap. I want somehow to take that back. That's not what I meant to say, but it's kind of what came out. They're unusual for me, but I really like them, and I feel like came from such a different place that they're almost a gift to me. Except that I remember struggling through them, so I know that I made them. But I feel like it was a collaboration with the composer. I feel like I made a painting in collaboration with the composer and musicians, so it's only partly from me, or something. Maybe that's why they're so different.

It's so interesting- a lot of artists participating in Bait/Switch end up making work that is very different from what they usually make.

Do you look at the artist's work and choose prompts that are different from their regular interests? Do you do research to choose things like that?

No. It's interesting- I'm a slightly Type A person most of the time. I plan things. But this project has taught me that that's not how it wants to work. I kind of allow the prompts to choose where they're going, as wild as that sounds. That's kind of how it works. I find that most of the time, the right person gets the right prompt. There have been very few times when it hasn't worked, and I think in those cases, the artist just wasn't ready to go there, wherever it wanted to take them. It can be uncomfortable I think. But it is amazing how the prompts just find the right artist.

It was meant for me!

Call Number: C28MU | C32VA.caDe

Julie Caves is a painter fascinated by sunlight, her paintings are full of ambiguity to allow the viewer to find themselves in the painting and she likes to see the paint before seeing the subject matter. She has an MA from Camberwell College of Art and completed the 2-year Studio Painting Programme at Turps Art School. She lives and works in East London and Margate, UK.

By Julie Caves

Knowing that the piece of music would change with each subsequent listen, because I would become accustomed to it and hear it differently after some time, I planned to do three paintings, thinking each would show the response at different times of acclimatisation. They would be oil paint on 80x100cm stretched canvases. 

The first time I listened I imagined painting it. There was a definite top half and bottom half. Lots of sinking marks moving from the top half into the bottom half and swooping marks moving upwards. So much happens so quickly. Lots of little fluttering groups of marks. A silvery blue icicle made stabs. I thought the screeches would be definite colours but instead they changed - yellow, orange, red - all warm colours. There was a stable section that could have been green. I do not have synesthesia, I don’t see colour when I hear music, but I was making a possible painting in my mind and trying out which colours fit the sound best. Which colours caused the discordance, which colours stabbed, what colour would be high pitched, which would swoop. 

The physicality of the piece made me consider actually laying out a very large piece of canvas on the floor and painting with my whole body as I improvised some sort of dance response to the music. But I decided I wanted to see if I could do a more controlled application of paint, using brushes on a 1 metre wide stretched canvas. 

Because I wanted sinking and swooping from above and below I prepared all the canvases with an underpainting that divided the space in half. Then I mixed up colours, laid out brushes and started the music. I then painted to the music in a spontaneous manner. I tried using brushes in both hands but that didn’t work. The first painting was blocked in, in the first playing of the music, but later became another painting. I played it through dozens of more times to go back into areas and complete them. I tried ideas and wiped them away and liked parts and moved that idea onto the next canvas in a new way, improvising and learning and figuring out which things that I thought would work, actually did work. The first painting I started was the last I finished. 

I noticed that I heard the music very differently listening at home than in the studio.

When I listened at home-

The main picture in my head is of the musicians playing their instruments, of the presence of people making sounds. But I also ended up feeling like it was a soundtrack to a black and white suspense film, that the murderer was picking his way across a dark and shadowy yard to silently enter a house and creep through a darkened room towards his sleeping victim. Each time I listened it became more frustrating that I couldn’t see what was happening on my imaginary tv in the other room. But interspersed in with this feeling are moments of Dance of the Seven Veils, Twilight Zone, old Disney animation comedy, maybe Bewitched and these disturbing drops that end in deep dismal depression. 

When I listened while painting-

I tried responding immediately to each sound with a mark but it happened so quickly I didn’t have time to consider where to place the mark or what colour to use. It ended up a mess. And the music was damped down by the painting, my brain focused on painting and the music faded out a bit and went by super fast, like 6 times as fast. It was over in about 30 seconds. Whereas at home I heard all three minutes of it and it lasted a long time. It’s weird - I both focused more and let my mind wander freely at home when I was doing nothing else, only sitting and listening. I heard the music more clearly.  Whereas in the studio I was trying to let the music feed the painting and so the music was inside my head with my painting thoughts and I lost track of which was which. So the music was less distinct. 

I usually have music or an audiobook playing while I paint. I have wondered if the choice of music affects the painting. But it’s more often a case that I listen to what will help me clearly focus by distracting part of my mind, and yet isn’t so interesting that it distracts my full brain. Painting requires a combination of concentration and distraction. Concentration on the paint, the idea, the movement, the visuals, on not losing sight of the original motivation for starting this painting so as not to wander off in other directions. Distraction from an inner critic, from overthinking, from doubts that creep in, from second guessing, from analysis too early. Concentration of the painting brain and distraction of the analytical brain. So I choose sound in the studio as an aid to painting. But this was completely different. It was like I let an alien into my head and was trying to translate for them. 

But eventually I started seeing some things that were working, that made sense with the music and made sense visually. I wiped away most of the chaos and started figuring out how to put together the ideas of 

1. Descending lines like vines or thin snakes. Slightly curving, scratchy long and short lines. Touched spots. Yellow ochre, pink, purple and blue.

2. Snail trails of paint wandering above and below the horizon line, something like the silhouette of a winter tree and it’s shadowy reflection on the ground. Reds and blues. 

3. Lines curving downward, starting quite straggly and thin, ending as full, heavy shapes in a dark sea. Then dragging lots of thin lines of paint through the layer of wet paint, the lines rising up high at the end. Over and over. Then lots of staccato plucks all over. Reds, greens and blues. 

I’m not sure about the three titles. Right now they are Descending, Reflecting, and Ascending. They are verbs in the present tense, happening now.

Unexpectedly, all 3 paintings ended up being landscapes. I wonder if that is just the horizontal dividing line or if I was also responding to the title of the music. ‘Saint and Snakes’ makes me think of Saint Patrick and for some reason I always picture him in a landscape with trees by a river, maybe baptising people. The long lines could refer to snakes as well as the long notes.

This immersive listening had an unexpected effect. On the third day of painting I found myself noticing all the sounds on my walk to the studio, not just looking at the visuals. The sun kept going in and out of clouds so shadows kept appearing, sharpening and then fading. But also, the refrigeration units were humming when I passed the small meat processing building and at the last minute radio music was faintly coming from their side window, the birch trees were hissing in the breeze that came and went, a siren was wailing in the distance, two men were chatting in the shade next to a building, birds were chirping somewhere, a sign was flapping, an ice cream van played just the first three notes of its tune and stopped - nah nah nah, more trees rustling, pop music coming from up in an open first floor window echoing in the courtyard of the apartment blocks, a scooter starting and roaring past, an airplane growling overhead, not the one I can see because it’s too tiny, a car door closes, a woman speaking low to her grandson in the front garden, a child whinging up ahead with her mother, a man on his phone passes me, birds screeching intermittently, traffic passing on the main road ahead, a black and white cat lying silently on the pavement in the shade of a car, as I get closer to the main road there are lots of sounds to distinguish in the rushing sea of noise - some RandB thumping, bus brakes squealing, a car that needs servicing cos the engine is making a sort of scraping sound, two couples chatting, one in front of me and one behind, lots of different motor sounds - pulsing, grinding, hissing, purring, clunking, doppler effects of passing sounds at different speeds and gaps of silence after they have passed, a door slamming, motorcycle zooming, footsteps, wind whistling, revving motor, more birds.