Yellow House Painting

J Lawrence Abrams is a prolific artist whose works span 50 years. At age fourteen he received private instruction where he learned to apply solid fundamentals of design and color, and at age eighteen his oil paintings received juried top awards at various New York art galleries and centers. He painted from nature, particularly wildflower gardens in his loose, painterly way of manipulating oils on the canvas which is still evident today. During these years he also had a love for music, especially percussion. He studied under artist and mentor William Bippis while pursuing an undergraduate degree in percussion performance at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester N.Y. His eight years of advanced studies in both disciplines simultaneously greatly affected his approach to form and composition in the visual arts as well as music, realizing the capabilities of this natural occurring parallel of their compositional parameters. Similarly, to the “Orpheus Group’ of the earlier part of the 20th century, he began to interchange concepts of two-dimension and three-dimension art works with those of absolute music compositions. His philosophy of the visual arts is that they are first felt through the senses, as is with absolute music, thereby; what is perceived durational in one discipline(tonal) can also be observed simultaneously in the other (visual) and vise-a-verse. For example, the theme and variation format of music composition can also be applied to visual art, and devices such as silences or pauses in music can be compared similarly to voids in a painting or sculpture. In his works these elements are hierarchically arranged to work interdependently with each other. This is exemplified particularly throughout the set of ten paintings by J Lawrence titled “Pictures at an Exhibition”; these are based on Mussorgsky’s piano suite of ten “tonal pictures”.