I consider music to be a tool in my studio.

Fred Tomaselli, in conversation with Joe Figg, Inside the Painter’s Studio, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009

Why do I need music while I’m painting? There’s something about the act of entering which I find in each. I find the temporality of music to be similar painting. I don’t know if paintings are like music – yes I think it probably is. Music for me is a way to directly tap into a particular body mind situation, feeling, mood or memory, and so I have specific musicians and albums and pieces of music that I use, quite a wide repertoire, although I often get into one thing for a period of time and listen to it over and over again. I take this so seriously that I often won’t listen to the music I’m using to paint at other times of the day.

Music adds temporality to paintings because it reflects the physical actions of painting, which happen over time. There are the actions which occur at the time, the ‘push-pull’ of paint passages against each other, and the gaps between episodes, which are in effect between layers. When you look at a painting, it can go on forever because the painting act is embodied in the paint, in pigment, and especially in the fluidity of the carrier, ie water or medium. A painting has ‘passages’, which I’ve always imagined to be music, to be temporal like music rather than some other, purely visual, sense.

For the artist, and for the audience if they are informed, the memory of doing the work can be reanimated over and over again by listening to the same music as was playing when it was made. 

Really I just often think of how I want to paint pictures like how music feels to me. It’s difficult to express verbally, because of course that is the point – both music and painting can express what can’t be said in language, they are their own languages for showing emotions and experiences, which can tap into the actual feeling. Or rather, I suppose, if you experience memory as a set of physical emotions. Maybe not everyone experiences memory like that, or emotion either.