Robert P. Taylor's Musicians: Reflections of Music Making

Musicians  Creator and Artist
Robert P. Taylor

Between 1996 and mid-2001, the six years covered by Musicians, while making or waiting to make music myself, and occasionally while attending performances in which I was not involved, I have made more than 1000 drawings of musicians, 320 of which appear in this site. Aside from enjoying the creative process of doing so, my aim in making the drawings was to use them as the heart of a website about musicians making music which would be interesting, revelatory, and informative to those browsing it. My conviction this would be achieveable springs from several contributing factors and presuppositions which I only briefly suggest below and by comments scattered here and there throughout Musicians. Of course confirmation that the site is indeed interesting, revelatory and informative can only come from browsing it. Some background may nevertheless be helpful in orienting that browsing.

First, I executed a total of over 4000 sketches and drawings between 1996 and mid-2001, not just the 1000 or so of musicians. Drawing them, and studing the art of others, has convinced me that drawn images are revelatory of the people drawn and the events they are involved in - the concerts, the services and ceremonies, the recitals, and the rehearsals of all sorts. Second, in travelling about the world in this same six years, I increasingly came to see sketching as a tool to explore global communication, too, because, like music, sketched images can communicate across language and other cultural barriers. Nothing therefore seems more globally appropriate than a website that is a sketched reflection of musicians. Finally, I see musical preformance and rehearsal as yet another example of how human encounters are life-defining, apart from, in spite of, or in addition to, the definition provided by a human's formal plans for life and its major events. The first two links below elaborate these ideas further and the third provides access to sites which illustrate them outside music.

Encounters and events as life-defining   Images as records of encounters and events

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