Abstract Jazz Musicians

Rhythm in the Lines

The challenge of translating music into a visual medium is that sound carries no physical weight. When sitting with a sketchbook in a dark room, watching a group of jazz musicians, the eye doesn’t just track the anatomy of the player; it follows the trajectory of the sound.

In this series, the focus turned toward the friction between structure and improvisation. The composition began as a series of loose, traditional drawings—charcoal marks and ink washes capturing the slant of a shoulder over a bass or the sharp angle of a wrist against a brass valve. There is a graphic quality to these early marks, a reliance on hard edges that mimics the initial attack of a note.

“The process is less about illustrating a performer and more about documenting a cadence.”

To capture the layered texture of a live performance, the traditional drawings were brought into the digital studio. This collaboration of media allows for a different kind of mark-making. By overlaying vibrant digital colour fields against the raw, textured tooth of the original paper, the figures began to fragment. The software isn’t used to polish the image, but rather to manipulate the space around the musicians—allowing the deep blues and sharp, warm tones to bleed into the background much like sound filling an empty hall.

The resulting pieces intentionally leave gaps and imperfections. A line stops abruptly where a phrase might end; a colour field overlaps an edge to show movement. It is an exploration of how digital and physical tools can balance one another to record something as fleeting as a time signature.