Ave Maria: Radiance, Sanctuary and the Structure of Music
Music unfolds through time.
It moves, develops, departs and returns.
In the practice I call Drawing Music, I explore whether these musical structures can be translated into visual form - transforming composition into spatial colour systems.
Rather than beginning with a palette, each work begins with the structure of a score. Musical intervals, rhythm and tonal relationships generate visual proportion, colour and geometry.
The work Ave Maria explores these ideas through a radiant circular composition inspired by Franz Schubert’s setting of the famous prayer. The piece draws not only from the structure of the music itself, but also from the story that surrounds it — a moment of quiet refuge within Walter Scott’s narrative poem The Lady of the Lake.
Radiance and the Empty Centre
The circular structure of the work recalls the radiant halos found in Renaissance painting, where rays of light extend outward from a sacred presence. These sunburst halos were visual systems used to represent something intangible — divine light made visible through geometry.
The Virgin Mary, Ghent Altarpiece of 1432 by Jan van Eyck
In Ave Maria, the centre of the composition is intentionally left empty. In traditional religious imagery this is where the subject would appear: the head encircled by light. Here the absence invites contemplation. The empty centre becomes a place of potential presence — a symbolic space of origin.
Musically, this centre can be understood as the tonic: the tonal home from which a composition begins.
Ave Maria, ING Discerning Eye 2022
Departure and Return
From this central origin the rays extend outward, radiating through the composition.
In tonal music, a piece often begins at the tonic before exploring other harmonic territories through Modulation — the movement into different keys that creates tension, development and narrative within the music.
The outward movement of the rays reflects this same principle: a journey away from the centre in search of resonance before the possibility of return.
Structure Before Colour
The work approaches colour structurally rather than decoratively, drawing on traditions that connect musical harmony and visual form. Bauhaus colour theorists such as Johannes Itten explored systematic relationships between colours that parallel harmonic relationships in music.
In this sense the composition functions like a visual score: a spatial arrangement generated from musical relationships rather than aesthetic preference.
Colour follows composition.
Sanctuary
Across centuries the idea of sanctuary has remained deeply human. Whether spiritual, emotional or geographical, the search for refuge continues to shape human experience.
In Ave Maria, the radiating structure becomes both musical and symbolic — a visual meditation on departure, refuge and the quiet hope of return.
View the work
You can explore Ave Maria in more detail, including additional images and purchasing information here
Drawing Music
Music translated into spatial tone.
What is your place of sanctuary?
Is there a piece of music you find yourself returning to — again and again — as a place of quiet refuge?
How Colour Becomes Sound
Harmony, Structure, and the Logic Behind Drawing Music
At the heart of my practice, Drawing Music, is a simple but enduring question:
What happens when music is allowed to exist in space rather than time?
Music unfolds moment by moment, while drawing exists all at once. My work explores the meeting point between these two languages by translating musical scores directly into colour — not as illustration, but as a parallel system shaped by structure, relationship, and progression.
The idea that sound and colour might share underlying principles has long fascinated artists and thinkers. Isaac Newton explored parallels between the musical scale and the colour spectrum, while composers such as Alexander Scriabin associated musical keys with colour and imagined performances combining sound and light. My own work does not seek to replicate these systems, but it sits in conversation with them - rooted in the same curiosity about harmony across sensory languages.
How I Choose My Colours
When people ask how I choose the colours in my work, I often begin by saying that I work with the colours of the rainbow. It’s a simple phrase, but a deliberate one. It immediately evokes an ordered sequence - a spectrum in which colours exist in relationship to one another rather than as isolated events.
From the very beginning, what mattered most to me was how colours lead into one another. Red moves naturally into orange; orange into yellow; yellow into green. These transitions feel harmonious because they evolve gradually. A jump from red directly to green introduces a much sharper visual tension - a different kind of relationship altogether.
This sense of continuity became fundamental to my colour system. I wanted colour to behave as notes do within music: understood through proximity, progression, and flow. Harmony, in this sense, is not imposed, but allowed to emerge.
Numbers, Patterns, and Early Conditioning
Looking back, I can see that my attraction to systems, sequences, and coded structures began much earlier than my formal training in either art or music.
As a child, I loved activity books that resembled word searches - except the “words” were not words at all, but numbers. Simple groupings at first, combinations of two or three, gradually increasing in complexity to strings of seven, eight, or nine. I was fascinated by scanning the page, recognising patterns, and finding order within what initially appeared abstract.
In many ways, selecting colour today through strings of numbers and letters feels like a continuation of that early fascination. Referencing a precise colour code, for example e30613, is not a clinical or detached act for me, but a familiar and reassuring one. It allows colour to be understood relationally rather than symbolically, situated within a system rather than assigned a meaning.
I often think of this as a form of environmental conditioning: an early comfort with coded information, progression, and pattern recognition that now finds expression in my artistic process. Just as those childhood number searches rewarded patience and attentiveness, my work today relies on careful observation, and on how one element leads into the next, and how structure can quietly give rise to harmony.
It feels fitting that Drawing Music sits between music and colour - both languages shaped by sequence, relationship, and the unfolding of patterns over time.
The digital palette I work with
Working within a continuous colour spectrum allows for gradual, harmonious transitions. Individual colours are selected precisely using digital colour codes.
Tonal and Atonal: Seen as Well as Heard
These ideas become particularly visible when comparing tonal and atonal interpretations of the same piece of music.
Top image: Tonal version of Ave Maria, Bottom image: Atonal version of Ave Maria
In tonal translations, colour often reveals a clearer sense of tension and release. There is a visible rise and fall as colours shift and resolve, echoing the directional pull of tonal harmony.
In atonal interpretations, colour behaves differently. Progressions may feel more continuous and evenly distributed, with less emphasis on contrast or resolution. Rather than moving towards a centre, colours coexist within a more generalised field.
Although atonal music can sometimes sound unfamiliar, its visual translation is not discordant. It simply carries a different flavour - cohesive, rich, and quietly harmonious in its own way.
Because my work translates note relationships directly into colour relationships, emotional qualities emerge through structure rather than being imposed. Just as music can be harmonious in more than one way, colour, too, can hold balance and beauty across different systems.
Music is usually something we hear and then lose.
Drawing allows it to remain - suspended in colour, structure, and space.
Why I Draw Music
On translation, colour, and letting music speak visually
For a long time, I’ve felt the need to explain what I do — not defensively, but honestly. To put language around a practice that lives between sound and colour, between listening and looking. This feels like the right place to begin.
Recently, I was listening to a podcast by Michelle Lynne, where she was speaking with guest, Dustin Boyer, about branding in the Classical music world. One point in particular stayed with me: within the classical repertoire, so many musicians are working with the same scores, again and again. What we hear is often less about asserting individuality for its own sake, and more about serving the composer — about conveying what the music itself is asking to express.
That idea resonated deeply with my own practice.
From performance to study
Music has been part of my life from a young age, and the piano was my first serious creative language. I completed all my piano grades and a Trinity Performance Certificate, and for a long time I imagined music might become my primary path. While I don’t claim the life or discipline of a professional concert pianist (and I still feel a genuine humility in the presence of those who have pursued music at that level) the way I listen has been shaped by years of study, practice, and attention.
There is also something more personal at play. When I was learning the piano, I was always aware that I didn’t spend enough time away from the instrument, studying the score quietly — sitting with the music, understanding its structure and inner logic beyond the demands of performance. Drawing Music has become a way of returning to the score away from the piano, engaging with the music as a visual artist….studying its structure, relationships, and logic through colour rather than through performance.
Translation, not performance
In Classical music, the performer is alive, present, and bringing something of themselves in that moment. Some composers, like Glenn Gould for example, have placed particular emphasis on the individuality of the performer and the act of interpretation itself.
My role, however, is different.
I am not performing the music. I am translating it.
Working directly from the score, I translate musical notes into colour through a pre-determined system. Because of this, I am not expressing emotion through gesture or physical interpretation. Instead, I allow the music’s own truth and beauty to emerge visually, through the relationships between colours.
The emotional content doesn’t disappear — it simply shifts location.
Where the dynamics live
In my work, dynamics arise through colour itself.
Just as dynamics in music are created through contrast, tension, and resolution, the same happens visually. A red next to a blue creates one kind of tension. Red layered over green and pink produces another. How colours sit beside one another, how they merge, clash, or soften — that is where movement lives in my work.
This is why my process can appear methodical, repetitive, even dogged at times. I return to the same system again and again, much like the Classical repertoire returns to the same scores. But within that repetition, subtle differences matter enormously.
I am operating entirely within the visual field, yet the logic remains musical.
From Prelude in D Minor, Bach. Left: bars 5-8 separating right and left hand. Right: Bars 5-8 blending left and right hand
Digital drawing, light, and material
There is often an assumption that digital work is easier, quicker, or emotionally thinner than traditional drawing. I’ve wrestled with that idea myself. But for me, working digitally allows me to mix colour through light rather than pigment — and colour, quite literally, is light.
Digital colour is governed by coded systems, numbers, and relationships (not unlike music notation itself). Every decision is intentional. Every mark is chosen.
My top-of-the-range works are printed on ChromaLuxe aluminium panels using a sublimation process that permanently fuses colour into metal, creating exceptional depth and luminosity. Alongside these, I also produce limited edition prints on fine art paper. These are equally carefully considered, signed, and editioned works that offer a different, more intimate way of living with the work. Metal amplifies light and saturation, while paper offers softness and quiet presence. Both are integral to my practice.
Why I’m sharing this
I’m writing this because connection matters.
Drawing Music is not about decoration. It is about attention. About listening carefully, translating faithfully, and trusting colour to carry what sound has already communicated.
This year, I’ve committed to writing one blog post each month. This will be a space to share not just finished work, but the thinking, listening, and quiet processes behind it.
If my work resonates with you, it’s likely because you recognise that space too — where meaning builds slowly, and repetition becomes devotion.
That is where my work lives.
A Joy That Lasts: From Bach to Colour
Prelude in C – A Visual Meditation on Serotonin
There’s a kind of joy that doesn’t rush in, sparkle, and disappear. It builds slowly. Lingers. Deepens over time. This is serotonin joy - and it’s something I return to again and again in both music and art.
One of the first pieces that brought this feeling to life for me (visually) was Prelude in C, the very first in my signature Stripes series, created in 2020.
The Music Behind the Work:
Bach’s Prelude in C Major is a favorite among pianists, not because it’s flashy, but because of how it feels, both to play and to hear. Its steady rhythm (a stream of arpeggios) mimics breath. There’s no rushing, no climax - just movement through time, harmony, and emotion.
It’s calming. Reassuring. Spacious.
Extract (bars 24-27) from Prelude in C by Johanne Sebastian Bach
Translating Sound to Colour:
When I created Prelude in C, my belief (and hope) was that the colours would follow that same emotional architecture. Nothing sudden or loud. A rhythm of stripes that gently invites you in. A visual meditation.
The result was just this!
In the World:
Since then, this piece has found its way into many spaces - art fairs, London’s The Shard, in the chic cocktail bar of London’s Town Hall Hotel, until finally settling into the private collection of a buyer who told me it brings them quiet joy each day!
For me, that’s the power of serotonin-inspired art.
It stays with you.
It shifts the room.
What artwork (or piece of music) has stayed with you over the years? I'd love to know.
You can get in touch with me here
🎧Listen to my performance of Prelude in C here
An Art Exhibition Called ‘Farnham Legends’
After six months in the making, it was finally time to showcase all our hard work.
We had a fantastic Private View at The New Ashgate Gallery on Friday 12th January!
Fiona, Chloe and I, each gave a short speech about our work, as well as welcoming The Heroes to perform a selection of songs. Stephen Noyce led the band from Post19 brilliantly, with whom I had collaborated by interpreting a couple of their songs into vibrant and unique, digital fine art.
From left to right: Fiona Pearce, Chloe S Moncrieff, Elizabeth Mikellides
If you would like to listen to what I had to say on the night, click on the video above!
You can listen to The Heroes in action on the night by clicking above!
If you would like to visit, 'Farnham Legends,' the show will be on display until March 9th at:
The New Ashgate
GalleryWaggon Yard
Farnham GU9 7PS
✨View more artwork from the artists I exhibited with here: Fiona Pearce and Chloe S. Moncrieff
The Creative Act of Drawing
Drawing is something we are all capable of doing
2nd October, 2023
This is my first blog post and I would like to begin by introducing what Drawing means to me and how I believe this is at the core of all creativity. In writing briefly about Drawing, I also hope to encourage you, the reader, to draw also.
Drawing is something we are all capable of doing and I would go one step further in saying we ought to do. Whether you keep a sketchbook as a personal diary or whether you choose to share your work with others, Drawing is invaluable to our emotional wellbeing. We solve, resolve, aspire and dream through drawing and this is why it is imperative to us as people and creators of our world now and future.
I always enjoyed drawing from a young age myself and went on to study art at university. The BA Hons I took was actually a Drawing degree. Drawing is not just the preliminary step we undertake before painting. It is much, much more! Here are a few characteristics / descriptions of Drawing:
Records information
Explores ideas through sketching
Encourages curiosity
Teaches us to see
Fosters imagination
Helps the flow of ideas
There are specific principles to Drawing of course for when we look at perspective and technical drawing in general but there is also an intuitive and playful side to it, which is what Picasso worked so hard to capture. Drawing can therefore be confining and liberating. It all depends on what you want to communicate and how. Music has also always been important to me, and I choose to describe it through drawing. These first explorations began on my Drawing BA back in 2000.
Describing, delineating, drawing parallels and discovering patterns in music scores is what I love to do. I choose to do it digitally and use Illustrator for this via the mouse pad. Drawing digitally suits my current process because I’m looking for accuracy and specificity of colour tones - something mixing paint on canvas won’t give me.
My working method is logical and calculative at its core but can be intuitive as well. Similarly, a piece of music is written with certain musical theories and concepts (logical bit) and the performance of that piece, is an interpretation of the score, using dynamics and period styling (intuitive bit).
Piano Piece I: Bars 14-15, music by Jens Morsing
Drawing allows me to make sense of the world around me – of music. It is my escape, my sanctuary. Through drawing, I can reconnect with music and share its inner beauty with others by giving it visual form. It’s a kind of music appreciation through visual art.
Drawing could be something you also turn to, to reflect on moments or elements in your life, to make sense of them or to take a break from them. Through this introductory post, I encourage you to draw yourself. Go buy a little sketchbook or a big one! Enjoy experimenting and taking some time out.
I have work in two shows this month, which you can learn more about on my website’s homepage. One is called Rhythm in Art at Liberation Gallery in Brighton and the other is The SOTA Accessible Art Fair in London.