Ten visual artists explore the relationship between sound and vision

It’s Nice That has partnered up with Spotify Fresh Finds, the go-to playlist collection for emerging artists across genres. Pairing up a global group of independent visual artists with musical ones, the group have created a series of patterned backgrounds representing each genre. This week we take a deeper look into their process.

The creative practises of music and visual art have long been intertwined. Music’s influence can be seen in artworks as far back as Henri Matisse’s Dance (1) from 1909, accelerating through to countless influential album artworks from the likes of Peter Saville during the late 1970s to 80s. Since the dawn of MTV, music videos have since provided a bountiful ground to push this relationship, whether it’s Radiohead’s iconic animated rendition of Paranoid Android, or the viral quality of those early OK-GO videos laying the ground for music to have a watchable quality as much as a listening one.

To explore this relationship further and across many disciplines, It’s Nice That has partnered up with Spotify to create a series of original artworks for its Fresh Finds playlist suite, which exists for fans to discover emerging independent artists, categorised by their genres.

The project is centring on playlists carefully curated by the Spotify team, across the campaign. For example, artists such as Alfie Kungu have focused in on the qualities of hip hop, the hazy airbrush style of Robin Clifford Ellis interprets indie, and elsewhere Antonio Carrau’s collaged patterns imbue the vast boldness of Latin music. Sometimes ambient, often abstract, and always creatively representative of the genre they’re tackling, the final ten artworks see ten visual artists illustrate the exciting momentum that builds when you hear an artist you love for the first time, no matter the genre.

To create this natural approach, Thami picked up objects fans of his work will notice as regular contributors to his style. Often working with felt-tip pens, which create a detailed pattern quality on top of his already ornamental illustrations, having the final outcome be digital led Thami to experiment with the qualities of scanning in his drawings. Creating free flowing patterns, which he describes as like “a series of modules”, once scanned Thami would select an area that felt appealing for its texture, “zooming in on some of them with a rather rough look”. In turn developing a few renditions “that were a bit confusing yet interesting,” these served as a basis for the illustrator’s final renders. The artist digitally collaged these fragments together creating a background of watercolour-like textures, pulling from various sources and merging them together – just as experimental music artists do.

When designing his shape-focused works, Antonio always recycles as much of his collage work as possible. “One of the best things about working with paper is that every time you cut out a shape you also get negative shapes,” he explains. Often looking up from his intricate work and finding a desk full of inverted designs, “this results in a big library of coloured shapes which can be used within the same project and fit in perfectly.” Piecing together these works is also an intuitive process, an approach the illustrator shares with Paola’s pop playlist, and the resulting energetic feel of the works.

This process involved Isu largely working by hand, drawing each piece on paper with acrylic markers and then taking them into Photoshop to further the composition. This mix of practises mirrors Isu’s usual approach too, as an artist who works across disciplines from “painting on canvas, digital drawing and animation,” she describes.

In turn Isu’s backgrounds combine both miniscule and bold detail in illustration style. Like many other contributors, the illustrator has created free flowing shapes to house the artist’s who sit centre stage. Looking closely however viewers will spot more intricate detail, with layers and layers of frequency-like lines sitting on top of one another.

It’s an apt mix considering the levels of inspiration each channeling into the project and across the ten artworks in total, each new explorations further intertwining music and art.