Making Air Visible

The process of visualizing something that cannot be scene with the human eye always brings on its own challenges. Think of unicorns, Santa Clause, and the ever present poet, el chupacabra. Like I said: its own challenges. So as I sat in the front of Notre Dame waiting for mass to start, I faced my own Parisian unicorn, and visualized the invisible.

Without warning the organist trumpets his first chords breaking the flow of tourists as they rush to the pipes to take a picture of them. I imagine them going home to their husbands and wives to show them, and I laugh because I wonder what is the more powerful memory, the image of an organ or the sound of one? I understand their thought process though because the image states to the rest of the world, "Look, I was here!"

The collected sacredness of being in Notre Dame and the profanity of a line of tourists behind me made me feel like I was in a zoo, so I decided to close my eyes and open my ears.

I imagined the sound as a huge sky of silk filling the space transforming from an airy delicate fabric to a heavy bellowing concrete cloud and back again. During the whispers, it would float just above my head and throughout the chorus it would will every void within the space like water in a sponge. I could feel the expansiveness to my left and my right due to the millions of folds in the reverberations. Since the main choir was in front of me, their wall of sound would hit my face and echoed with each evolving chord. The sound had physically conceived itself in a cruciform pattern. I was left speechless.

I broke every drawing rule I taught at USC. I threw out perspective/detail and I began to draw blindly with my eyes closed, from imagination to image. Literally three hours later, I opened my eyes and stared at the mess of lines I had drawn trying to document the sound. It looked nothing like I had imagined. In fact, it was better.

And to top it all off, it said to the world "Look, I hear"