Painter transforms music into colourful works on silk

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Detail from a silk work by Nova Scotia painter Holly Carr. (SUPPLIED PHOTO)

Like a jazz soloist or an improv comedian, Holly Carr never knows what she's going to make until she's caught up in creation.

The Nova Scotia artist uses bright-coloured fabric dyes to paint on heavyweight silk. About seven years ago, she started painting live in front of concert audiences, allowing the music to flow through her onto the material.

She has painted with classical soloists, choirs, poets, jazz, rock and folk performers, and ensembles as large as the National Arts Centre Orchestra.

Sometimes, like an improv comic, she takes image suggestions from the audience and works them into the piece.

Carr appears tonight (and again in Brandon on Sunday afternoon) with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra in a concert titled The Artist's Life, conducted by Jean-Marie Zeitouni and featuring works by Haydn, Strauss, Mendelssohn and Mozart.

While the orchestra plays Mozart's Symphony No. 39, which takes about 25 minutes, Carr will paint an 8 x 8-foot work on a panel of stretched silk.

The silk "screen" will be backlit and she will work behind it, facing the audience, so she's seen in silhouette.

"I paint in rhythm with the music," Carr, 45, says by phone from her farmhouse near Canning, N.S. "I sort of pretend my brush is like the conductor's baton."

Carr says she listened to the Mozart piece once about five months ago, but has avoided hearing it again because she wants to respond in the moment.

Her works often depict birds, butterflies, animals and voluptuously fleshy women. They're effective as art pieces independent of the music, she says.

"I absolutely love whimsy, colour, humour and big, curvy lines," she says. "It's very accessible."

Carr, a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, describes herself as "not theatrical." But she has heard the comment that her live painting resembles dance.

"I do move with the music, and I'm almost six feet tall," she says. "I have sort of a big presence."

When she's working in the home studio she shares with her painter husband, Alan Bateman (son of wildlife painter Robert Bateman), Carr listens to music, but has the silk lying flat.

Having it stretched upright is more challenging, she says, because fabric dyes tend to run. She developed her technique considerably during a coast-to-coast Vinyl Café tour with storyteller Stuart McLean and his musicians in 2005.

Carr is aware of other artists who paint live, but none who do it on such a large scale, or with such diversity of partners. She'll soon appear with the Symphony Nova Scotia to create a 30-foot painting in an hour.

"I have big dreams of things I want to build," she says, "that are absolutely huge in scale, with music...

"I'm heading to Halifax to paint to music with this small boy who is this amazing karate master. He's going to be doing karate all around my painting."

Carr's silk paintings created with the WSO in Winnipeg and Brandon will be auctioned to raise funds for the Winnipeg Free Press's Pennies from Heaven campaign. Examples of her work can be viewed at www.hollycarr.com

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 13, 2009 D6