Symphony Number I 24" x 24"

See more paintings at the Glorious Brushstrokes Collection.

With Symphony Number I, James Nowak extends his exploration of painterly abstraction into the auditory realm, translating the structure and vitality of music into visual form. Part of the 2025 New Works Collection, the painting suggests that sound and image are not discrete languages but overlapping systems of rhythm, harmony, and tension. Much like a musical composition, the work unfolds across the canvas in movements—its brushstrokes functioning as notes, its colors as tonal registers.

The surface is dominated by sweeping arcs and assertive strokes of yellow, red, blue, and black, layered over a muted ochre ground. Unlike the dispersed buoyancy of Fly Away, or the frictional geometry of Tension, this painting presents a more deliberate orchestration. The strokes intersect, overlap, and push against one another, forming clusters that resemble chords rather than solitary notes.

The sense of rhythm is unmistakable. Yellow brush marks, broad and curvilinear, provide a lyrical through-line, while the red and black strokes punctuate like percussion, adding emphasis and gravity. Blue serves as a counter-melody, weaving between the other tones with fluid continuity. The result is a visual score—a composition that evokes motion, tempo, and syncopation without collapsing into chaos.

Color is the principal vehicle of musical analogy in this work. The ochre ground operates like silence in music: not empty, but a vital space that allows other elements to resonate. The yellows evoke brightness and elevation, functioning like sustained high notes. Red introduces passion and urgency, while black anchors the composition in deeper registers, conjuring bass lines or percussive strikes. Blue, with its cooler resonance, balances the composition, offering passages of calm amid the dynamism.

The interplay of these hues mirrors the layering of instruments in an orchestra, each with distinct timbral qualities but contributing to a unified whole.

At its core, Symphony Number I is an inquiry into the translatability of art forms. Can painting carry rhythm, melody, and harmony? Nowak’s answer is emphatically yes, but not through representation—rather, through the structural and emotional parallels between sound and image.

The title suggests both ambition and humility: this is the “first” symphony, an opening gesture in what might be a broader series of visual-musical explorations. It positions the painting not just as an isolated object but as part of a larger project, hinting at continuity and progression akin to movements in classical music.

Compared with other works in the New Works Collection, Symphony Number I feels particularly expansive. Tension framed the clash of order and gesture, while Fly Away embodied freedom and dispersion. Symphony Number I, by contrast, emphasizes relationality—how discrete elements can coexist and collaborate to form a whole. It demonstrates Nowak’s evolving interest in systems of interplay, whether visual, conceptual, or, in this case, musical.

Symphony Number I is both painting and performance: a visual orchestration that conveys rhythm, resonance, and polyphony through the language of abstraction. By merging the sensibilities of music and painting, Nowak reinvigorates the modernist aspiration for a “total art form,” while grounding it in contemporary sensibilities of movement, color, and relationality. It is a bold first step in what promises to be an ambitious and resonant series within the 2025 collection.