By John Beaulieu
When I came to New York City from Indiana, I encountered a world of sounds, languages, gestures, rhythms, and people completely outside my Indiana life experience. At first, it was challenging, and I wanted to go back home. There was so much happening at the same time. Different languages surrounded me on the street. Crowds moved in ways I didn’t understand. Cars, horns, subways, voices, street musicians, jackhammers, arguments, laughter, sirens, and countless human gestures continually entered my awareness.
Gradually, something changed. Instead of trying to filter these experiences into something already familiar to me, I began learning how to listen to them. People walking and moving through New York City gradually became a concert of Sound People.
Each person had a unique rhythm, gesture, movement, voice, energy, and way of occupying space. I began to experience these differences almost as I would experience different sounds in a musical composition. One person might be percussive, another flowing; one angular and abrupt, another soft and sustained. Some people seemed consonant with one another, others dissonant. Crowds became moving fields of constantly changing relationships.
The drawings in this series explore this experience of people as sound. I am interested in translating my felt experience of a person’s movement, gesture, rhythm, and presence into line, form, space, and visual energy. In this sense, each drawing is a kind of visual listening. Together, the drawings become a concert of Sound People. Individual voices moving through the larger improvisation of the city.
The Sound People drawings
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