Remedios Varo: Solar Music

Originally titled Music of Light, this surrealist painting by Spanish artist Remedios Varo (1908-1963) is about artistic inspiration and creative process, a theme to which Varo would return again and again in her works. The artwork’s central figure is some kind of a forest nymph wearing a grassy cloak and making music with a bow using the sun’s rays. The music she produces affects crystal casings that enclose birds, freeing them from their little prisons. The artist wanted to emphasise the liberating nature of art-making, and the fact that nature functions as a source of divine energy for the artist, imbuing her with mystical qualities needed to produce great works of art.

The painting is considered one of Varo’s masterpieces. It is largely brown-coloured, and the forest vegetation was rendered using a technique known as “blotting” (pressing absorbent materials with wet paint on a surface). Still, Varo painted meticulously the face of a nymph and the revived flowers, that now benefit from the sun’s energy and the musician’s gift. Here is how Janet A. Kaplan characterised the painting: “Through the conjunction of natural light, musical vibration, and the intervention of the artist’s touch, transformation is effected“, Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo, Abbeville Press, 1988. Remedios Varo was a unique artist who saw clearly the symbolism of alchemical transformations in our daily life, and wanted to underline our innate interconnectedness. In Solar Music, the artist strikes at the very heart of the mystery of creative potential and work, linking the creative power to our connection to the natural world.