Alexis International, World Art Media and New York Arts Magazine present Keith Morant: Music for Manhattan in a solo exhibition at The Broadway Gallery in New York City during the first two weeks in October, 2006. New Zealand artist, Keith Morant comments about his work: While I am fully aware that history has given us many artists that have been inspired by or taken their cue from musical composition, I feel obliged to point out that in my case, this is not so.
Morant continues,As the greatest and all-pervasive generator of human emotional responses, music is a condition of being. What begins with the regularity of a heartbeat and vascular-system extends its rhythmic expression from the child beating its spoon in hunger, through to the drumming of the celebratory dance of life (or death) itself.
All music is the ritualistic sophistication of life movement. In music as we know it this awareness of life movement is translated, through sound, to evoke an emotional before intellectual response.
However, for me there are other kinds of music. Geothe once referred to certain architecture, as ‘frozen music’ and I have always been a believer in Walter Pater’s dictum that art should ‘constantly aspire to the condition of music.’
This does not mean that, like certain artists, I wish to transpose a sound into its colour equivalent, nor do I wish to correlate, imitate or emulate any type of musical composition or composer. (Having said that, I must admit that when working at ‘my own music’ certain composers may influence it.)
My own music is merely the truthful response of my personal existence at any given time and place. It is the music of growth, of the microcosmic and macrocosmic, the resultant combustion of energy that translates this great rhythm of life into a visual phenomenon. Much of this music lies in the crowded wilderness of my unconscious from where it often (obsessively) manifests through some unfathomable cognitive connection. This connection is usually initiated by positive conscious feelings that are agitated into expression by unconscious desires, and while I often experience difficulties in getting started, (the Music for Manhattan series had a gestation of over two months and a hard labour of several ruined canvases) eventually something ‘clicks’ and the unconscious music surfaces and resonates through the studio.
In the case of these paintings the connections are not so unfathomable. They stem from the fact that I have visited New York many times and my wife and I lived and experienced some of the ‘music’ that is Manhattan in the late eighties and early nineties.
‘Music For Manhattan’ is exactly what it says – it is one man’s celebration of the beauty, strength, energy, (and latter-day bravery) that is every New Yorker’s music.
Keith Morant has been a Premiere Portfolio Artist at absolutearts.com since April 2006. View more of his work at http://www.absolutearts.com/portfolios/k/keithmorant/
IMAGE
Keith Morant
Title: LIGHT MUSIC II
Year Created: 2006
Medium: Mixed Media
Width: 1010 mm
Height: 510 mm
Depth: 30 mm
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