Painting Piano: #music inspired by visual #art

Thanks to everyone who is helping to make “Painting Piano” my best-selling album ever!

I’ve chosen to include several of the piano improvisations and paintings from “Painting Piano” throughout this post. I’ve also linked (near the end of this post) the videos related to this project from YouTube. I hope you enjoy them. What do you think of this project? Please add your comments below…

When my friend, Katrina Morse, asked me to play music for her art opening, I’m not sure if she knew what that would mean. I was immediately intrigued and grew more interested when I saw her paintings.

What she got in the end was “Painting Piano”: a set of digital piano improvisations inspired by the opening reception and especially by the paintings displayed there. It was a wonderful evening, hosted in the gallery at Leidenfrost Vineyard. The people who came were friendly and deeply appreciative of the art. Once they heard that I was playing based on inspiration from the paintings, several of them requested a particular piece of art and that made the interactions even more delightful.

In addition to enjoying the piano pieces and paintings here, I hope you’ll consider purchasing a download of the music and that you’ll see what Katrina is up to artistically these days.

We also created this video that highlights Katrina’s paintings visually, with the bonus track from the piano improvisations: “Reclining Stripes”. The second photo displayed in the video was taken of the piece by this same name. Katrina provided photos of her art from the show and I set the piano improv as the backdrop for them. Please add your comments on YouTube about this video. I find it to be very soothing. Maybe you will, too.

And finally, a live video from that evening, complete with live, improvised vocals. There were several of these later in the evening. As far as I know, this is the only recording of any of them. (I do not control this video, so it could be taken down without notice.)