Music Inspired Art

Music Inspired Art was a project for the beer brand Beck’s, in which music venues across the UK were painted with artwork made for the specific site. Each painting took its cue from a specific piece of music.

The surviving image shows how literally the theme could be taken: a whole wall becomes a piece of equipment, with dials, grilles and speaker cones drawn in flat blue, pink and black, at a scale that makes the room feel like the inside of an amplifier.

Context

Painting a music venue is a particular kind of site-specific job. The rooms are often dark, crowded and used mainly at night, so the work has to hold up under coloured stage lighting and be legible from across a packed floor. Flat, high-contrast colour and simple graphic shapes cope with those conditions far better than fine detail or subtle tones.

Taking a single piece of music as the starting point gives each venue its own image while keeping the series connected. The approach turns a sponsor’s campaign into a set of distinct rooms rather than one design repeated across the country, and it ties each painting back to the reason people go to that room in the first place.

The wall in the photograph is a good example of how a sound can become a picture: concentric rings stand in for speaker cones, rows of round dials and short stripes suggest a mixing desk or an old stereo, and the strong pink against blue keeps the whole surface lively even when the room is half lit. It is a decorative scheme, but every element is borrowed from the equipment that makes music audible.