Fringe 2023 Luminescence Maria Rud & Tommy Smith St Giles' Cathedral 17th August Review
Luminescence featuring artist Maria Rud and saxophonist Tommy Smith at St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh was not only a merging of two very different artists and their art forms, but a symbiotic relationship which saw Maria Rud respond with visual art to the flowing music of the saxophone by Tommy Smith. The combined experience was a unique audio and visual experience for everyone in the audience tonight.
Tommy Smith is known to many people as the director of both the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and The Tommy Smith Youth Orchestra and sometimes these dual roles make it a little too easy to forget at times that he is also a saxophonist with an international reputation for his music. There are very few saxophonists out there who could have created the one hour of free flowing music that Tommy Smith created this evening.
Maria Rud is an artist who now lives and works in Edinburgh but the creative arts have been all around Maria all of her life and she is a graduate from Surikov School of Art, Moscow and Academy of Culture, St. Petersburg. Maria Rud has over the years let her creativity take her into many different art fields, and tonight her connection at an instinctive level to Eastern European Iconography featured heavily in her work.
Images come to Maria Rud in music and they are often more of an emotional response to sound than an intellectually planned exercise in art, and how we each react at our own emotional level to these images is as important as the art itself. Tonight as Tommy Smith created flowing and changing strands of music with many different tones and emotional shades, Maria Rud created equally flowing and changing works of art which were digitally projected onto the large stained glass window on the rear wall of St Giles’ Cathedral to create works that lasted for fleeting moments only to be replaced by something new and amazing.
In the Eastern art of the Orthodox Church an icon is considered not only a sacred image, but a window to heaven, a doorway to another reality which we can only at times glimpse but never truly hold in our physical hands. It is also believed that if you stand before the face of an icon, its eyes are watching you, and tonight with these images being projected on the walls of a religious building that will be 900 years old in 2024 I certainly got that feeling of being a small part of something far larger out there. I could not but help wonder too how many colours, images and sounds this building has experienced, and maybe somehow remembered within its very fabric over the years.
Sometimes it was possible this evening to get a small window into Maria Rud and her creativity as certain notes and tones from Tommy Smith on saxophone created a colour or colour range, an addition or subtraction of paint, or even the use of symbols in Maria’s art, and when a work was more fully formed for a moment or two it was also a representation of Tommy Smith’s music in colour, texture and imagery and if you looked closely, unravelled the layers a little then strands of this music could replay for a moment or two.
Pythagoras had a theory that music, sound and mathematics were in fact the one thing and watching music and art evolve together into new creativity tonight he was right. Perhaps also, Maria Rud’s response to music and sound gives her for a brief moment or two access to a space beyond what we normally experience on a daily physical level in our lives. Ultimately where does art, music, words and creativity come from? Perhaps that is one question that we should never find the answer to.
“Luminescence” is a partnership with Amati Global Investors and there are two more AniMotion Show performances on Friday 18 and Saturday 19 August.
Review by Tom King © 2023
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
Tommy Smith is known to many people as the director of both the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and The Tommy Smith Youth Orchestra and sometimes these dual roles make it a little too easy to forget at times that he is also a saxophonist with an international reputation for his music. There are very few saxophonists out there who could have created the one hour of free flowing music that Tommy Smith created this evening.
Maria Rud is an artist who now lives and works in Edinburgh but the creative arts have been all around Maria all of her life and she is a graduate from Surikov School of Art, Moscow and Academy of Culture, St. Petersburg. Maria Rud has over the years let her creativity take her into many different art fields, and tonight her connection at an instinctive level to Eastern European Iconography featured heavily in her work.
Images come to Maria Rud in music and they are often more of an emotional response to sound than an intellectually planned exercise in art, and how we each react at our own emotional level to these images is as important as the art itself. Tonight as Tommy Smith created flowing and changing strands of music with many different tones and emotional shades, Maria Rud created equally flowing and changing works of art which were digitally projected onto the large stained glass window on the rear wall of St Giles’ Cathedral to create works that lasted for fleeting moments only to be replaced by something new and amazing.
In the Eastern art of the Orthodox Church an icon is considered not only a sacred image, but a window to heaven, a doorway to another reality which we can only at times glimpse but never truly hold in our physical hands. It is also believed that if you stand before the face of an icon, its eyes are watching you, and tonight with these images being projected on the walls of a religious building that will be 900 years old in 2024 I certainly got that feeling of being a small part of something far larger out there. I could not but help wonder too how many colours, images and sounds this building has experienced, and maybe somehow remembered within its very fabric over the years.
Sometimes it was possible this evening to get a small window into Maria Rud and her creativity as certain notes and tones from Tommy Smith on saxophone created a colour or colour range, an addition or subtraction of paint, or even the use of symbols in Maria’s art, and when a work was more fully formed for a moment or two it was also a representation of Tommy Smith’s music in colour, texture and imagery and if you looked closely, unravelled the layers a little then strands of this music could replay for a moment or two.
Pythagoras had a theory that music, sound and mathematics were in fact the one thing and watching music and art evolve together into new creativity tonight he was right. Perhaps also, Maria Rud’s response to music and sound gives her for a brief moment or two access to a space beyond what we normally experience on a daily physical level in our lives. Ultimately where does art, music, words and creativity come from? Perhaps that is one question that we should never find the answer to.
“Luminescence” is a partnership with Amati Global Investors and there are two more AniMotion Show performances on Friday 18 and Saturday 19 August.
Review by Tom King © 2023
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com