To a casual glance, these works look severe, perhaps austere: straight-edged, pristine black shapes against stark white. There’s no gesture or indulgence, not so much as a fleck out of place. But sit with these images and they begin to move. The forms pulse in relation, in weight, measure, and repetition. They slide and lean in various cadences. This is an abstraction that’s ostensibly “geometric”, but movement is insistent in the form.
You realise this here is the parsimony of rhythm in black and white. Music is expressed as musicality in shape and colour, the forms echo notation but aren’t passive, they animate themselves. Our eyes perceive a strident rhythm, the blocks of black assemble like punctuation, and silent pulses of white space assert themselves as fully and insistently.
These images resist resolution into pattern—“the grid” is ever-present in the uniform relations of shape and colour, but the forms are rendered as a unity on the surface. There is no implied continuity beyond the picture’s edge.
These stark images are called “Brazilian Rhythm 1 and 2”. This is confounding — of all kinds of music, who’d be daring enough to render such a thing into black and white? The musical creole of far-flung cultures brought together, in the grain of maracas, the stride of piano, the dancing guitar. You could gather guesses about the source of these structures—from syncopated samba to the languid staccato of bosa nova. Regardless, there’s a quiet thrill in the conceptual audacity of it.
The artist, Daphne Cousins, was synesthetic — a rare condition in which two or more sensory pathways are bridged. To Cousins, sound and vision were conjoined. Her work evolved early on as an investigation into her subjective experience of sound. The Brazilian rhythms, in her words, were devised to “optically simulate the energy and contrapuntal vitality of the sound.” These were minor works that epitomised a grand ambition—to transmute a sensation that was personal in essence to a public medium.
Early in her career, the sensation of this synthesis of sound and colour was put to paper and canvas systematically—a colour was intuitively assigned to each tone on the scale. Such a practice deepened Cousins’s appreciation for music, particularly classical music—Bach and Bartok were twin passions. Concerts and listening sessions transported her into a state of awe and wonder, no doubt arising from the eccentric synthesis of colour, tone, shape, contrast, timbre and rhythm happening within. To capture such a thing, if possible, became a lifelong creative preoccupation.
In works dating from the late 1960s to early 1970s, Cousins gave life to synesthetic sensation at scale, producing spectral apparitions that spread across the surfaces of paper and canvas—loose grids of tonal blocks wavering against the open darkness of black.
Like the music itself, there is a continuity of tones and the measured silences between them. It’s hard to describe these as forms as if they are figures against a ground. We ought to think—or see, rather—in terms of “colourscape”. These span the paintings horizontally from edge to edge, wavering vertically in a way that resembles the oscillations of sound waves.
In the 1970s we see more emphasis on composition, on reconciling independent forms, and a more refined and muted palette of colours. One composition is anchored in 45-degree diagonals of grey bands fringed with tonally equivalent hues of blue and red that fold over themselves. Among these bands, vertical columns of horizontal stripes in varying tones convey subtle rhythms.
The bands’ folds and their interplay with the vertical columns hold a tension between flatness and the illusion of three dimensions. Like the earlier works, there is movement, but the movement is steady with an absence of momentum. The painting is a knot of judgements — edges pause, planes overlap, lines intersect, and colours modulate form. Coherence is achieved not by fusion but by coexistence, much as two melodies coexist within a single passage of music.
The banding and stripe motif continued to be explored throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but in progressively wider colour ranges of lush and bright varieties. In one series, tone seems to be explored systematically through the striped-column or band motif; in others, rhythm animates shape. Some works are saturated edge-to-edge with rhythm and colour, such as the pastel rainbow series; others opt for large colour fields rendered either by vigorous gesture or with a machine-like precision.
The works of the 1990s are more pared back. Diagonal and horizontal lines are the principal motifs, and emerging more clearly here is what Cousins called “the auditory space-field”—an enveloping ground into which the pulses of rhythm pass in lines. The presentation is so crisp in these works it resembles print. It brings to mind Cousins’ transitional statement:
“I am now working with sound concepts, (moving away from the immediate stimulus) dealing with specific qualities and situations inherent in sound […] One has become concerned with defining the interaction between sound and mind in visual terms.”
The effect is for those who are not synaesthetic to re-present the beauty of music as concrete form. It’s impossible to be literal about this. In her Master’s thesis, Cousins wrote, “the aim is not to replicate synaesthetic experience but to explore intense creative ideas implicated by it.”
Cousins considered developing a system of representing music. In such a system, what would the work of different composers look like? How would duration in time be expressed? How and where does music exist when we hear it? How is loudness, pitch, rhythm and timbre expressed?
To even come close to answering these questions, Cousins had to generate that visual equivalent of the “auditory space-field”—a topology, if that’s even possible, where sound/forms structure themselves.
Her experiments in translating bars of the works of Bach, Mozart, Britten, and Bartok into a uniform 12-colour scale and duration-to-length ratio were interesting but unsatisfactory. It was, in her words, a “limiting paradigm […] bound by the strictures of another’s creativity.”
In her postgraduate research, Cousins struggled with how exactly to render music in space. She soon resolved the problem by inverting the auditory space-field. So, instead of rendering the sound within a void, the void was situated in the inner area of the painting, and the sound/colour was rendered on the outer edges in block-like forms.
When set against a white ground, the interplay of colour flowing out from a void into the whiteness became a more satisfactory expression of music in light and colour. The paintings became long in width—up to eleven feet in fact—as they traced time in space from left to right. The colours bled around the edges of the canvases, giving the painting more of an object-like appearance, bringing the musicality of colour into the space of the room.
We can see two longstanding threads through Cousins’ career—the experimental ambition to systematise the “simulation” of music in visual form, and the continual investigations into form and shape inflected by the bridging of auditory and visual senses.
In every case, forms are divested of any semblance of nature. But that’s not to say they are unnatural. Each image summons a sense, at least, of the deepest, most fundamental structures of thought ensconced in the mind. These images are echoes of the inner sanctum of subjective experience—to behold them is to feel the connection that Cousins sought.