Kubla Khan

Tamsin Rosewell, 2016

Commissioned by Ange Hardy for Esteeesee
Ink and gold leaf on canvas

I paint songs. I don’t mean that I illustrate them, as far as I’m concerned I am actually painting the music. When we are born the neural pathways that will later distinguish different senses are all connected; so new-born babies can’t tell taste from smell, or hearing or sight. They experience a sort of all-encompassing sensory emersion in the world. In the first weeks of life the pathways separate out in most humans and they will hear, see, taste and so on as different senses. The neural pathways that are related to perceiving music remain, I’m told, connected those that enable us to understand the nuances of language. However, a few people end up wired a little differently. About one in 2000 people are synaesthesic – that means that they perceive one sense alongside and as part of another. The most common form is called croma-graphemic synaesthesia, which means that numbers have associations with particular colours. Others associate colour with scent.  For me I don’t really hear music as such, at least not in the way most people do; I see it. I see colour and pattern and texture when music is playing. If I’m honest I am not really aware of and I don’t think about melody as such because, while I can ‘hear’ it perfectly well, I perceive it differently. To me a melody is a combination of colour and texture. ‘Hear’ and ‘see’ are not particularly helpful words at this point, perceive or identify are probably better. So, if someone isn’t actually listening to what you understand to be your music, then what are they experiencing when they listen to your track? Having explored this for some years, I think the best answer is probably ‘everything else that goes to make up a song’. Lyrics are extremely important to me, if someone sends me a mumbly song, then I really have no concept of what it is about. Higher pitched music that hits high into head-tone is something is struggle with massively. Harmonicas, some fiddle playing and some female voices all just hit me as searing scratches of very bright acid yellow/green and everything else dissolves. Yes, there is some music I really can’t make any sense of at all. Screechy female backing vocals are always ruining otherwise lovely songs for me! To see a song rather than hear it is not really so odd as it sounds at first, after all we already all use language to describe music that describes colour and texture. For example, if I told you that an artist’s singing voice was rich, or had a warmth, was full of colour, velvety, silky, glowing, sparkly or bright, you would know what I meant without me having to explain it. So perhaps we all still have connections between those neural pathways that we are not consciously aware of. I tested my perception a few years ago in a very public way and wrote a series of reviews of music albums; at no point in that time did any artist suggest that I hadn’t understood or heard properly their music, in fact I had the opposite, almost all said that they thought I had really listened and really understood it. However one might describe what I experience when I listen to music, it can’t be too far from what the rest of the world experiences. I just look in to the prism from a different plane.

So, I paint music. What I paint is a combination of what I see, in terms of colour and texture and sometimes pattern, and on top of that I place the lyrical content of the song, often in its entirety – so there are references to all parts of a story being told, and sometimes references to other songs by the same artist that are related to what I’m painting. I hide things in my paintings too, the same way that a musician will have obscure references to poems, people, places or moments in their lyrics. In my paitnings you will find little creatures that are important to the artist, flowers or figures sometimes words, letters or numbers. When I came to paint Ange’s setting of Kubla Khan it was clear to me that what was needed was a piece that placed the image of the damsel with the dulcimer right at the centre. Ange’s music revolves around her and her role in the landscape of the poem. The dome itself is a striking opening to the poem, but it is the damsel whose melody weaves throughout the piece from beginning to end.  Coleridge wrote the poem while he was living in the Highgate house owned by his friend Dr James Gillman. He hoped that Dr Gillman would cure him of his opium addiction, but he died there in 1834 ‘whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles of jargon’. His room was on the second floor and commanded a view of the glorious woods of Hampstead Heath and of Kenwood House, with its vividly painted, domed library, arched windows and ornate columns.  He compared the view from this window to his own dreamed landscape of Xanadu. He brought the gardens inside his room and grew herbs on the window-sill: myrtle to symbolise lost love and rosemary for remembrance. Coleridge’s  Xanadu is astonishing; there are walls and towers girdling vividly coloured gardens. It is both ancient and richly built at the same time. There is lush fertile ground above icy caverns. There is a pleasure dome, built for beauty, joy and indulgence on the banks of a sacred river. The few characters who stalk this lurid and slightly troubling landscape are seen only in half-light, and we are not sure who they are and even if they exist at all.

The image is structured round the damsel with her dulcimer. The dulcimer work on Ange’s track is devised and performed by the glorious dulcimer player, Kate Rouse. If you’ve seen Kate perform you’ll know that she has lovely tumbling auburn hair and beautiful refined, almost Renaissance features – so I popped her into the painting. She played the dulcimer on the track so she takes that role in the painting too.  I thought long and hard about what sort of dulcimer she should be playing in the image; the figure under the dome has held four different instruments in her past. I am an historian by background so even though I am painting a dream-landscape the details have to be historically accurate and properly researched! On the track Kate is playing a hammered dulcimer; however, no dulcimers of any sort exist in 13th Century Mongolia, at the time of Kublai Khan himself (at least there is no evidence for them, they seem to have come from the Middle East in about 900AD and spread from Spain to northern Europe in 12th century ) so I opted to paint the type of dulcimer that Coleridge would have known. The Mountain Dulcimer (or Appalachian Dulcimer) was a new design in Coleridge’s time, but had the status of an instrument that was a romantic ideal; it was connected to and played by the people who had explored the world, settled in new lands and forged their own culture based on a memory of ideal England. They had a romanticized notion of Appalachian residents as being ‘our Elizabethan ancestors’. The image I found of the earliest dulcimers from this pre-revival or traditional period (mid-1800s to 1940) had very long necks and rounder bodies. I painted one in the hands of our damsel. It didn’t look right at all; it looked like she was playing a banjo while trying to look ethereal. So that got scraped off with acetone, and I replaced it with a dulcimer from about 1840.