You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - A Cross-Discipline Conversation - #41

Episode Date: March 12, 2018

Peter and Adam sit down with Open Studio graphic design intern Clara to discuss the similarities between visual art and music. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Menace and I'm Peter Martin and you're listening to the You'll Hear It podcast. Today on You'll Hear It, we're going to do something a little bit different. We have a very special guest, Clara Arnold. How are you, Clara? Pretty good. How about you? Good. So this is totally free form. We have nothing prepared, but we thought it would be fun to talk to Clara. Clara is one of our graphic designers here, our lead graphic designer here at Open Studio. She heads the graphic design team here at Open Studio. Right, she's both the team and the manager of it.

self-managed. But anyway, so the podcast you're probably hearing us doing it in the background a little bit. We're talking about how to get better every day as a jazz musician. And so I know you're not a musician, right? I played piano when I was younger, but that was about the extent of my musical adventures.

Whoa, we got a ringer in here. Hold on, we got a pianist team. This is not a setup you guys. Okay, so you do have a little bit of music experience. Okay, that's good to know. And you say when you're younger, you're still very young, so it couldn't have been that long ago. Okay, so like, from like four to like 13. Wow, we got some years behind you. That's seven years of piano. Okay.

Nine, but... Nine, was five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Ooh, okay. Yeah, a little bit. But you got me. But Claire's about to start some art schools, so I think that we could talk to her about the relevancy between music and art. I like that. And learning a skill. I like that very much. A little cross discipline. A little cross discipline. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so what, yeah, what are your feelings in terms of, you know, you're an artist, but I know you listen to music, you like music. Because you're around us a lot, you at least pretend to like jazz, which is a smart thing. There you go. But what connections do you see between art and music and in terms of how you work on your art,

if any? I mean, they're both in the same realm. They're just people expressing their emotions, right? So I feel like art has this power to bring people together and people go to a music concert and enjoy everything together. as people will go to a museum and enjoy everything together. So it's that expressing your emotions and putting it out for people to see. And, you know, that's what all art is.

That's beautiful, yeah. Ooh, thank you. You know, so do you have a thing, like when I see, when I go to the, like, the St. Louis Art Museum and I see paintings or drawings or any visual art, a little part of me as a musician, I'm like, like, I can almost hear that. Like, it sounds like something, you know what I mean? Do you have that when you listen to music, you like I can see that. Oh yeah definitely. I feel like everything like stories and you know music is just sort of a story. I always get these images in my head about how I would shoot them if I was like doing a video or draw them if I was going to like paint something. So yeah definitely. Well that's great. I mean we're always talking about on a real you know granular level that the building blocks to how you put a story together but for a listener and for a fellow artist that really is a really.

is I think the main thing that binds. You know, sometimes people will be like, oh, well, this painting was blue, and it's like the blues and the music, and I'm like, I don't know about that. I mean, it's not that specific maybe, right? But the art of storytelling, and like you kind of brought up the community element,

like, you know, people going to a museum together, experiencing a concert together, there is that feeling of energy between the appreciator or the audience and the artist. And I think jazz musicians, we've always felt that immediacy because we're improvising, we're playing music, and I know for artists, a lot of times you guys are working more in a solitary situation. And it's not, how are you able to kind of bridge that community element?

Is it at the exhibit you kind of have to wait or are you imagining that? I mean, I feel like it's sort of split up between exploring yourself in your art and you just put it out there as like sort of have to do this to make money, but really this is for me. and however anyone else interprets that, that's great, but this was a piece done for myself. And like, peace is done for a community. So, like, done with the intent to reach a certain audience.

So, you know, when the Ferguson protests happened on South Grand, they put up all the murals and, like, covered the entire street with murals. And that was meant to be seen by the community. So it was all, like, preaching peace and, you know, understanding. So I feel like there's definitely the difference between the two, but it's all, you put it out there. Yeah, great stuff. So you might have noticed that as this is going on in the background, we're recording these podcasts, that we talk a lot of nuts and bolts and how to get better.

And, you know, Peter and I work with a lot of young musicians, but as a young artist, can you talk about where you're at in your discipline of, like, how much time do you get to spend working on your craft? Do you what I mean? Yeah. How, like, is there a difference between, like, technical work and conceptual work of, like, thinking about how you want things to look as opposed to practicing, making them look that way? Yeah, definitely. There's not as much time as I would like to work on everything.

I mean, of course, if I want to pursue that as a job, you better, like, working on it a lot, because that's what you're going to be doing all day. So, yeah, I mean, with school, most of the day goes to that, but when I get home, especially, like, college applications, really made me work on art a lot. So for like, I'd say two hours a day and when I was like in the worst parts of it, well, not worse, but like I had to work the most. Right, right. Not the worst, the most awful part. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah, I would work on it like every single day and for one school I had to do a sketchbook where you basically draw every single day and fill up like 100 pages in a month. And so a lot of that is like

balancing the technical, like what you do to try and improve and also like maintaining, being able to do stuff for yourself, so working more conceptually and applying those techniques that you're learning. Wow. Okay. Why wasn't I taking notes? Well, we're recording, this is good because this is some good information for us. Thank you for coming and educating us, that's definitely bad. No, that's great stuff and that really is, I mean, the essence of what we're talking, we're trying to talk about every day here with this daily jazz advice. It's really artistic advice and balancing, you put it so eloquently, balancing the technical and the creative and, you know, having that part of our practice routine. And as you said, too, like,

you better, if you want to pursue this as a job, you better like doing it because, you know, the glory of the exhibit and the glory of the gig is just a small, very small percentage of time that we're actually spending with the instrument. I mean, so many people, I've done. I've, traveled around the world playing this instrument, and they're always kind of seeing me at the peak. I got my best clothes that I own on. I'm in the best piano in the hall with the best musicians, and they're like, wow, this is amazing.

I'm like, this is like 3% of the time that I've spent with this instrument. It's usually, you know, in a different situation by myself, you know. And I think there is that solitary element that we have to embrace and revel in or we're just going to be unhappy otherwise. It always strikes me, too, the similarities between the disciplines of art and how similar learning it is and conceptualizing it is. You know, there's all, there's only like four or five concepts, really, that every artist tries to draw out and make minutiae of.

We did say at the beginning of this episode that this was going to be interdisciplinary, and we have achieved that. My five is all around. Four steps to becoming a great illustrator, go. I have no idea. So maybe we call this the you'll see it. Yeah.

Yeah, we talked about doing one of these. Yep, so there it is. You'll see you. Thank you for happy. That's it for today's episode of You'll Hear It. We'll be back tomorrow, but if you need more information, you can go to you'll hear it.com.