A Quote by Black Thought

I started as a visual artist and I've always dealt with music in that same sort of way. — © Black Thought
I started as a visual artist and I've always dealt with music in that same sort of way.
Unlike a lot of choreographers, I don't always start with the music. I often start with a visual artist, and then find music that fits the world of that visual artist.
I'd just sort of gravitated toward the arts, and I had always loved music and really loved theater, even though I didn't want to act. For some reason, being in Kansas, you can either be a graphic artist or a visual artist, so I decided, 'I guess I'm going to be a painter.'
The idea of using media for expressing yourself artistically is kind of something I learned from my mother and my father. So for me, I think growing up wanting to be an artist, I always imagined myself sort of crossing over or mixing media and so it was a natural evolution for me to try to express in a filmic way or in a visual way. It just kind of seems like a natural sort of progression for me in terms of what I'm trying to do as an artist.
I've been a visual artist my entire life, so translating music to imagery has always come naturally to me. Tycho is an audio-visual project in a lot of ways, so I don't see a real separation between the visual and musical aspects; they are both just components of a larger vision.
Drue [Langlois] and I started making music together before we started the Art Lodge, so I guess musical collaboration came first. The music we made, and our performances, always had a visual component. I could never play an instrument, so these other elements compensated for that a little.
Sometimes when I write lyrics there are images in them, usually on a quite simplistic level, like colors. But most often music comes first and then later I sit down with visual people and we chat about what we want to do. I don't look at myself as a visual artist. I make music.
Obviously, something like ballet, you have music, you dance with the music and it's a very direct connection. With visual art, when there's no music that accompanies the art, such as great masterworks in a museum, you wind up interpreting what the artist is doing, how the artist made that work and what they're conveying.
I was a painter before I was a writer, so I was always a visual artist. And my writing, to me, was always visual.
I'm a really visual artist, and I love writing treatments for music videos, photo shoots, fashion, and all the visual parts that go along with making an album.
I'd been making music that was intended to be like painting, in the sense that it's environmental, without the customary narrative and episodic quality that music normally has. I called this 'ambient music.' But at the same time I was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way that music changes.
The ways in which acquired savants show up are usually the same ways that congenital, or non-acquired, savant syndrome shows up. They tend to show up in the same areas: music, art, math, visual, spatial skills, and calendar calculating, although calendar calculating probably isn't quite as prominent in that group. They tend to show up quite quickly, or sort of explode on the scene and they then tend to have an obsessive sort of forceful quality about them in the same way as savant skills. So they tend to show up in the same ways.
Music has always been a visual thing to me, so writing and drawing the 'Skin&Earth' comics, which tie cohesively with the music, was an obvious move for me as an artist.
I have so much music that I do. Just like how a visual artist is always sketching something but they might not share it, I'm always writing songs or coming up with melodic lines on piano or guitar. It's therapy. It's always happening.
I was always a visual artist my whole life, and I came to music really late - when I was 21 or 22 was the first time I ever touched a musical instrument. For me, it was always this fun side hobby.
The way I sort of approach my work is that the historical and socioeconomic and cultural worlds that the music is exploring dictate the visual experience and the way that we approach it specifically on film.
John Cage is someone I got into as a visual artist, before I even knew his music. I don't think a lot of people even know that he does visual art.
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