Listen with your Eyes...

The information panel said something about exploring the close links that existed between colour and music. I was standing in front of a Roland Wakelin painting, a candy-coloured landscape, that hung with a similarly bright Roy de Maistre in the NGV:A's Joseph Brown Collection.

It got me thinking: what links between colour and music? There was the Blues, I guess. As a genre it evoked a 'blue' mood: in the key of flat. There's 'I Can Sing a Rainbow', by...er...was that Kermit? Whoever it was, it evokes a primary-coloured cheerfulness. In contrast to the Rolling Stones' 'Paint it Black', which could be described as dark-sounding.

This merging of the senses is known as synaesthesia. Wakelin and his contemporaries (including Roy de Maistre, Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith - all represented at NGV:A) attempted to represent sound in paint. De Maistre's early experimental works attempted to synchronise the two: attributing a colour (or shade of) to a musical note. Yellow was C, and the scale of C major was called 'yellow major'. Higher octaves were brighter and lower were darker.

With this in mind, I decided to let the two works sing to me. To run the mental dial past the static and tune into some music - there's always some swimming around in my head, albeit pop tunes I picked up by osmosis at the supermarket. The synthscapes of Lemon Jelly sprang immediately to mind: less for the colour reference in the name, and more for their meandering mixes and bright washes. I'm going back with a loaded iPod.

by guest: James Cann