"When we open ourselves to fully experiencing music, the border between sound and body dissolves." (An Interview With Janelle Cordero)
Half Mystic Journal’s Issue IX: Synaesthesia examines the extension of touch, blush of sound, symphony unfolding in post-rain light. The fervor and shift of synaesthesia find a home to settle in our Issue IX featured artist, Janelle Cordero. Please offer your warmest welcome as we discuss watercolor, the spirit, and the music in the spaces between.
HM: Issue IX explores synaesthesia: the blue undressing of voice—the song-scent wafting on wind—the tongues of memory and light. How did you conceptualize the issue’s theme while creating your synaesthesia suite?
JC: I started conceptualizing this issue’s theme by listening to some of my favorite music by Norah Jones, Ray LaMontagne, Joni Mitchell, and Ray Charles. We have an old-school record player at home, and I’ve fallen in love with the physical act of sliding a record from its sleeve, placing it on the turntable, lowering the needle, hearing the slight speaker crackle before the first track begins. So I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the sensation of music moving through my body as color, and then I transferred that vision to paper. I wanted to preserve my minimal, figurative style while at the same time injecting more color, more gauziness, more light.
Your work represents the human form in a variety of poses, ranging from extended limbs to rounded shoulders to truncated torsos. Where do you define the border between the body and the music?
Music is very much felt in the body as something fluid. It expands through us, within us and beyond us. Sometimes we dance to it, sometimes we sway, sometimes we sit quietly, sometimes we collapse from exhaustion or grief or joy or a force bigger than all three. I want these pieces to depict how music lives in the corporeal form, though it might take different names—color, vibrancy, motion. When we open ourselves to fully experiencing music, the border between sound and body dissolves.
Each piece also features a ghost-like presence transposed onto the page. Do you see these echoes as existing in tension or harmony with their twin forms?
The ghostly layers in these paintings symbolize the spirit rising from the body during the act of listening to and creating music. This ties back to the previous question on the line between body and music: when we are fully immersed in a song, something inside us lifts out of that entrapment of physicality. With regards to tension, I’ve always felt a sense of disconnect between the spirit and the physical self. But in those moments when I can be fully present, such as when I’m painting or writing, harmony exists.
You are an interdisciplinary artist and have released several books of poetry. What have your explorations across media taught you about the things that live between disciplines and senses?
Poetry and painting satisfy different parts of me: poetry is all about internal observation and reflection, while painting is about external observation and reflection. Poetry takes the personal and makes it universal, while painting takes the universal and makes it personal.
Your work as a whole overwhelmingly finds an anchor in portraiture. What steps do you take when drafting a figure to ensure it looks the way you envision it?
My artistic style is very loose. I’m self-taught and have never learned how to mathematically sketch out bodies or faces. So I trust my eye, and the natural variation in the human figure. We’re not all the same, thankfully, so my figurative paintings don’t all look the same. I also try to forgive myself when a painting doesn’t turn out the way I envisioned it—the painting where I can’t stop finding flaws might be someone else’s favorite piece.
Are there specific songs that change how you create? What is the soundtrack to your art?
My husband is a brilliant musician, producer and vocalist; his art is the soundtrack to mine. Sometimes he’s playing a soulful tune on the piano, other times he’s creating a hip hop track with his synthesizers and drum machine, or he’ll grab an acoustic guitar and start singing something folksy. His talent, discipline and versatility affect my art in ways I see and those I can’t—not least because I want to follow his lead. I’m endlessly inspired by him to grow in my own craft.
Your style has developed over time, branching through the organic and angular; the expressive and subdued; the delicate and emphatic. Tell us about the journey you’ve undergone to arrive at your current style.
I see my artistic evolution as a learning process. I began with acrylic and traditional canvas, mostly because that seemed like the easiest place just to make a mess and experiment. I loved flicking water onto those pieces to create drips and runs, which led to the shift to watercolor. Watercolor is by far my favorite medium because it feels so natural to me—the blending of shades, the murkiness, the ebb and flow. I’m a Pisces, so maybe that explains the fascination. Over the years I’ve experimented with ink and digital manipulation, but my foundation—and, I predict, my future—is in watercolor.
Art is so often a conduit for what we can’t yet understand or articulate. What advice does your art have for you? Do you know how to listen?
I’m always surprised by my own immediate, visceral response to a newly finished piece of art. Sometimes my most beautiful and delicate pieces aren’t my favorites, despite being aesthetically pleasing. I’m most drawn to the pieces that emit confidence, even if they’re technically flawed by a misplaced splotch of color or a bleeding cloud of ink. The human face and figure are inescapable transits of power, and seeing certain poses or expressions transforming the page grounds me in myself like nothing else. I can be self-conscious about my art because of my lack of formal training. At their best, my paintings remind me of my own worth as an artist and a human.
Your synaesthesia suite is entangled in a wash of color. What associations do you hold with color? How do you use it to render movement and memory?
Color is intrinsic to how I understand the world. I’m intensely aware of where certain colors live in my memory, subtly or obviously changing the way I move: green reminds me of the never-ending forests and soccer fields of my childhood, red is my husband’s Nord piano, purple brings up late spring lilacs. We all carry these associations with color. It’s an artist’s job to harness them in the pursuit of something beautiful, or surprising, or soothing, or new.
Synaesthesia is a song of cross-overs and liminal space. Between the canvas and the world, where are you headed next?
I’ve been experimenting with collage as an attempt to bridge the gap between the canvas and the world: I paint watercolor portraits and then create crowns for them using dried flowers. The juxtaposition of texture between the flowing watercolor and crisp lines of the flowers is really intriguing. And of course, there’s poetry. My upcoming collection, Impossible Years, will be published in September 2021.
Janelle Cordero is an interdisciplinary artist and educator living in Spokane, WA. Her writing has been published in dozens of literary journals, including Harpur Palate, Hobart and The Louisville Review, while her paintings have been featured in venues and shows throughout the Pacific Northwest. Janelle is the author of three books of poetry: Many Types of Wildflowers (V.A. Press, 2020), Woke to Birds (V.A. Press, 2019) and Two Cups of Tomatoes (P.W.P. Press, 2015). Explore more: Website | Twitter | Instagram
Issue IX: Synaesthesia, with art by Janelle Cordero and dozens more pieces of poetry and prose by contributors, is available for preorder now. Examining what it means to be fully present in the world, Issue IX flirts with the corporeal, sings as it stings. This is a story about touch which means hurt, hurt which means salt, salt which means movement, movement which means joy, joy which—of course and always—means music. It comes out on July 28th, 2021.