ART REVIEW : Painter’s Exhibit Fails to Connect Color With Music

Artists long have been intrigued by the idea of translating musical notes into visual form. Trouble is, the fancy theories behind the work tend to sound awfully tedious or far-fetched--and hard to apply to the visual evidence.

If a painter were to proclaim that his work incorporated all the notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, that fact in itself would have little more than a bizarre novelty value. So what, we would reply. How can we relate what we see to our knowledge of the score?

Still, the urge to translate one art form into another persists. Nancy Mooslin, director of the art gallery at the Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach, is an artist whose abstract paintings are concerned with the relationship she perceives between musical pitch and color. A group of her pastels and paintings and an environmental sculpture are on view through Feb. 28 at the Fine Arts Gallery at Long Beach City College.

Mooslin explains in a statement that she assigned the 12 colors in the color wheel to the 12 equal-tempered pitches in an octave, using darker colors for the low pitches (“which related to the rich, full sound of low-frequency vibrations”) and lighter colors for the high pitches (“just as the high-frequency vibrations are thin and clear”).

This is all very well, but the viewer has a hard time actually processing color as specific sounds, even with the color-to-pitch key Mooslin adds at the bottom of her two-dimensional works.

We are left with the shapes and colors, which range from rather humdrum arrangements of wide, intersecting arcs of color (in pastels called “Searching for the Music of the Spheres”) to the sprightly patterning in paintings intended to represent major scales. These small, engaging works are “syncopated” (visually, if not musically) with pileups of small, thick daubs of intense color on flat fields of lighter color.

The environmental piece is a series of six large arcs in various sizes, colorfully painted with geometric shapes, waves, cloud forms and other forms of ornament. Breezy and bright, the piece looks as though it would be at home in a playground. Actually, the sculpture consists of six musical compositions “translated” according to Mooslin’s system. But we have to take her word for that.

Mooslin’s interest in inter-media projects led to the founding of Connect 3, an ensemble that also includes choreographer Sylvia Turner of Orange and composer Darrel Dorr of El Toro. Wednesday night the collective premiered “Fractured Peace,” a 20-minute modern dance piece that incorporates Mooslin’s painted sculptures along with the music that “built” them. A big problem with mounting performances in gallery space is that the sight lines are usually woefully inadequate. Standing behind a group of tall people at the gallery entrance, I heard Dorr’s burbling score but saw only a fleeting glimpse of the proceedings.

“Fractured Peace” will be repeated Sunday at 2 p.m. and Feb. 23 at 8 p.m. at the Fine Arts Gallery, Long Beach City College, 4901 E. Carson St., Long Beach. Mooslin’s visual art remains on view at the gallery through Feb. 28. Gallery hours: 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays (also 7 to 9 p.m. Mondays through Wednesdays) and 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Fridays. Admission to the performance and the exhibit are free. Information: (213) 420-4317.