Seven Regards. (Short Films)-2026.
Seven Regards. (An Album of Short Films)
These seven films are designed to be short. Each one holds a single response to Messiaen whose music has been a lynchpin for my practise as an artist and it deals very much with transformation from one sense to another. The paintings were made in dialogue with the organ pieces, in Gillian Weir’s definitive recordings, and with the piano pieces, painted alongside the pianist Peter Hill. Each is intended to stand alone and chosen because to me they seem the most visual pieces of his work.
Olivier Messiaen heard colour in chords. His manuscripts unusually carry his own annotations of this with pencil and ink instructions to himself about hue and combination, a private colour language laid directly over the notation. He also uniquely went into Nature to notate Birdsong. This idea and notation in itself for me is beautiful and inspiring.
These films place that language alongside my own interpretations, over years and years of synaeshetic interpretations performing alongside and in response to his work. These artworks and films Manifested over the pandemic, and using the latest Adobe software of the time (2020/21) I went about interlinking the original manuscript pages with my own paintings , a project I had wanted to do for many many years. . The process was very slow, but suddenly made easier to merge by utilising advances in technology. Each film is only a few minutes long, but in process took far longer to make than its length might suggest . Some images are from Perspex paintings overlaid,( completed in separate performances) with one another and photographed after the moment , under passing sunlight . Each film is A compression of time . Each painting contributing to each film.
These films centre on Gesture, rather than to documentation. They are not records of performances, so much as constructions built afterwards, in isolation, out of another performer’s recording and a composer’s private marks, one hand answering two others, at a distance and after the fact. What the manuscript pages do in ink and marginal colour, the paint does again in motion; what the interlinking does in software is the third act of translation, slower and more deliberate than either, arrived at slowly even when it may read as immediate dialogue.
Read in sequence, the films are not a narrative. They are intended rather as a book of poems or a short album ; self contained, relating by return , each one being a further attempt at the same translation between senses, but never quite the same .
Mark Rowan Hull
September 2026.