Already a long time ago people noticed similarities between music and painting,or basically between sound and color.While music has to do with compositions in time,painting has to do with compositions in space and both trigger different emotions.
Besides painting I like to play the piano and listen to music,preferably Jazz.Also there is a strong influence on painting by music and vice versa.

Similar to music,visual art has a composition. Instead of a composition of beats, notes and tones… visual art has a composition of lines, shapes and colors. Like the rhythm of music, a lot of art pieces have a rhythm of lines and shapes. You can see this very pronounced in the dark lines that cut through the painting in Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles,or Number 11. In this image the music bar was overlayed to show the rhythm of the painting.

Painting and drawing are not just about rendering objects the best one could in the middle of the canvas. It is about creating a scene. It is about how the shapes interact with each other and create an emotion with the viewer.

I could,for instance, create a symmetrical composition to show stability…. or I could create an asymmetrical composition with the focal point on one side to add drama and motion.

Also, like music, visual art can create a mood. Rigid shapes and contrasting colors can give a harsh exciting mood like a full rock concert. You can see this is the painting by Paul Klee below. While organic soft shapes and light analogous colors can give a calm mellow feeling like a mellow acoustic song. You can feel this in the Monet painting below. Sometimes this is even illustrated in the album art of a band.

Of course just adding calculated notes doesn’t make good music. Music comes from the heart and soul. It comes from the expression of the musician. This also carries over to visual art. Drawing shapes on a canvas doesn’t make art. Art is the expression of the artist.,the mood they are feeling and the exploration they are taking.

Over the years,musical composers were inspired by paintings,such as for instance

The Great Wave off Kanagawa – Hokusai

Easily one of the most recognizable pieces of Japanese art(The great Wave of Kanagawa), is part of a series of paintings focused around Japan’s Mt. Fuji. In this particular work, Mt. Fuji is relegated to the background, and it is the massive wave threatening to overcome three fishing boats that takes the foreground. It is said that this was the inspiration for Claude Debussy’s “La Mer

The Starry Night – Vincent van Gogh 

The night sky was somewhat of a growing theme for Vincent Van Gogh in the late 1880s, and his paintings Cafe Terrace at Night and Starry Night over the Rhone both show hints of what is to come in this, one of his most famous paintings. The scene presented in the painting is a view of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence from Van Gogh’s room at the Saint-Paul Asylum in France. Henri Dutilleux’s orchestral work Timbre,Space Movement is subtitled La nuit etoile (The Starry Night) after this painting, and Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara wrote an opera about Van Gogh’s life, Vincent. He later adapted this music into his Symphony No. 6, the first movement of which is titled Starry Night.

An early attempt from me to try and paint an abstract composition,based on the jazzy Bossa Nova,called Wave (Antônio Carlos Jobim), resulted in the following painting.
Although I like abstract compositions (or improvisations),I think I still have a lot to practice on this.