‘The Shades of Music’ project, which was created for the Year of Frederic Chopin, is an attempt to illustrate a painter’s vision of the composer’s music. The artist is Mariusz Kaldowski. Cultivated from the enthralment with Chopin’s genius the artwork was painted with the aid of the sounds of the piano concerto in E minor, which reverberated onto the canvas creating a vivid narrative about Chopin’s love, the émigré’s sorrow, the longing for his homeland, the beauty of Polish landscape blended with painter’s own childhood memories.

With the Chopin’s portrait as a young man in its centre, the triptych was created. His face forms a link between the other elements of the painting, which represent distinct worlds.   The left depicts a Polish landscape, exploiting ever so familiar and symbolic willow trees. Though it is not a tranquil scenery, it is startlingly dramatic and full of disquiet. Frederic’s face looks to the right, signifying the future pictured on the third canvas. The future of disillusions about happiness is represented in a metaphysical photographic negative of the spilled out colours from nonetheless a good past painted on the left.

The eyes, however, are the focal point of the picture which recounts the man and his music. Chopin watches his audience and quietly observes the life that goes by. The past flows into the present and rushes into the future. From the memoirs written in the compositor’s notes, and from the artist’s colourful reflections expressed on canvas, grew a multi-media spectacle of sorts, a blend of music and fine art - ‘The Shades of Music.  Paintings Brushed with Chopin’, making it possible to both hear and see the music.

Gabriela Ulanowska

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