Where the Work Begins: What Music and Abstract Art Have in Common

By Simon Kenny | 6 min read

Music and abstract art share the same underlying grammar: rhythm, repetition, tension and release. I like to think I paint canvases in the same way a composer builds a score, using gesture and colour as my melody and rhythm to carry the same emotional structure as a sound.

In the last part of this series I wrote about the raw power of the Kent coast and what the sea taught me about energy and the Sublime. This blog post shifts the focus to the strange, persistent way in which painting and music keep answering one another, reflected in their processes, the relationships with their artists, and the impact they have on viewers and listeners.

What is the connection between music and abstract art?

Music and abstract art are connected through shared structure. Both rely on rhythm, pace, tension and release to create meaning without using literal language, and Lyrical Abstraction carries the word in its name. When I build a canvas, I am arranging movements the way a composer arranges a piece of music.

I will admit upfront that I have no formal training, and that my understanding of music theory stalled somewhere around my Year 8 recorder lessons. What I do have is forty years of experience standing in front of canvases, and this has taught me a great deal about rhythm.

A painting is never just one idea. It moves through several unique and interacting moments, the way a piece of music moves through a set of movements: an opening gesture, a development, a point where the energy breaks, then a close that either resolves the piece or quietly refuses to. I think about my own work in those terms far more often than I think about it in terms of ordered colour theory.

I have ideas and inspirations, but no concrete plan when I begin a painting. There is no track list mapped to a colour palette. The instinct breathes beneath the painting in the same way it beats beneath a piece of improvised jazz. We are players at the mercy of immediate energy and spontaneity, the unknowing builds the canvas and the song.

What did Kandinsky and Schoenberg discover about music and colour?

Kandinsky believed colour worked on the eye the way sound worked on the ear. In January 1911 he attended a concert of Arnold Schoenberg’s music in Munich and painted Impression III (Concert) immediately afterwards. Tate recognises the piece as one of modern art’s clearest examples of synaesthesia between music and painting.

I am not a synaesthete, as far as I know. I have never seen a sound or heard a colour in the literal, clinical sense that Kandinsky may have experienced. But I recognise the impulse behind what he was reaching for, as I feel something close to it every time I stand in front of a half-finished canvas with a track playing.

Claim: Wassily Kandinsky attended a January 1911 concert of Arnold Schoenberg’s music in Munich and painted Impression III (Concert) immediately afterwards. Tate identifies the work as one of modern art’s clearest examples of synaesthesia linking music and painting.
Source: Tate, “Synaesthesia”, art term entry, tate.org.uk, accessed June 2026.

Read Tate’s full account of the concert and the painting on Tate’s Synaesthesia art term page.

Kandinsky went further than most, titling entire bodies of work Compositions, Improvisations and Impressions, straight from a concert programme. I have never gone that far with my own titles. Mine tend to arrive after completion, once I can see what the conversation between the paint and I actually produced. But the underlying belief, that visual structure and musical structure are reaching for the same thing, is one I hold just as firmly as he did.

Claim: Arnold Schoenberg had already broken from traditional tonality, in his Second String Quartet, Op. 10, and Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11, before the January 1911 Munich concert Kandinsky attended. The concert programme quoted Schoenberg’s own description of dissonance as “remoter consonance”, the idea later set out fully in his treatise Harmonielehre.
Source: Schoenberg, Harmonielehre, Vienna, 1911, as documented in Artsy’s “Seeing Sounds: Kandinsky + Schoenberg” and corroborated in published academic analysis of the Kandinsky-Schoenberg connection.

What I take from him is permission more than method: permission to treat a feeling produced by one sense as valid material for another, even when nobody else in the room is hearing what you are hearing.

Why does abstract art feel like it has rhythm, even without sound?

Abstract art feels rhythmic because the brain processes colour, pace and form through some of the same cross-modal pathways it uses for sound. Peer-reviewed research shows that people without synaesthesia still reliably match faster, higher-pitched music to brighter colours, and slower, lower-pitched music to darker, cooler tones.

None of that surprises me. When a passage in one of my paintings is moving fast, thin glazes, quick marks, sharp contrast, it reads in exactly the way an up-tempo passage of music does. When the paint sits thick and slow, built up in heavy, worked layers, it reads the way a long, low note does. In this way I borrow the logic of musical arrangement and make it visible, tangible.

Claim: Peer-reviewed cross-modal perception studies find that non-synaesthetic observers consistently associate faster tempo and higher pitch with brighter, more saturated colours, and slower tempo and lower pitch with darker, cooler tones.
Source: Cross-modal correspondence research, Frontiers in Psychology and PMC-indexed studies, 2023 to 2024.

This pattern is well documented in the peer-reviewed literature, including the study “Colour Association with Music Is Mediated by Emotion”, available via the PMC open-access archive.

This is partly why I rarely plan a piece before I start it. If I already knew how it ended, there would be nothing left to play with whilst I work. I would rather walk into the studio not knowing whether the next hour produces three minutes of near silence or something closer to a wall of sound, and let the canvas decide which one it needs.

How does Simon Kenny build musical structure into a single painting?

Simon Kenny builds musical structure into a painting through repetition, variation and contrast, the same tools a composer uses across a movement. A mark is laid down, repeated with a slight shift, then interrupted, creating the push and pull of tension and release that holds the whole piece together.

I think about this most clearly with a palette knife loaded with two or three colours at once. The first pass across the canvas is never repeated exactly. The second pass echoes it, close enough to recognise, different enough to create friction. That friction, more than any single colour choice, is where the energy of the piece actually lives. I have written elsewhere about the ritual of music in my studio, the records that get the paint moving in the first place. This is the other half of that story, what happens to the music once it is already inside the work.

I came to painting properly during a period when very little in my life was in tune with itself. Looking back, I think that is exactly why a structure built from tension and release made sense to me long before I had any language to communicate this with myself and others. Schoenberg once wrote that dissonance is only consonance heard from further away. I think that line might be the truest thing anyone has said about how I build a painting. A canvas that can hold dissonance without falling apart was, for a long time, the closest thing I had to prove that I could too.

A closing thought

Whichever way I look at it, the comparison holds. A painting builds tension and resolves it, or chooses not to, in much the same way a piece of music does. I did not arrive at that connection through theory. I arrived at it through years of standing at the easel, listening, and noticing what the canvas was already doing before I had a word for it. I do not think every viewer needs to consciously hear the rhythm in a finished piece to feel it. If you would like to see where that rhythm has landed most recently in my work, the current collection is the best place to look, and I would genuinely love to know what you hear in it. Get in touch if you would like to know more, or if you would like to discuss a commission.