I’ve been studying the works of artist Russell Mills lately, paying particular attention to his rough textures, his use of found objects and blending of colors in abstract patterns. Mills is perhaps best known for his album designs for Nine Inch Nails. He’s collaborated with a wide variety of musicians and visual artists including Eno and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Here are some excerpts from an interview of him by Anil Prasad in innerviews: music without borders.

Walter Pater, a writer on the Renaissance, wrote "All arts aspire to the condition of music."

I believe, as did Pater, that music happens to be the more intangible. It’s capable of traveling far wider than other means of expression. . . in both the sonic and the visual works, I tend to gravitate towards the use of some kind of undertow of menace or uncertainty, an impression of events being dislocated or of disorientation, an organic approach reflecting nature's phenomenal processes of ceaseless flux. Obviously happy, feel-good music or bright, airy visual work tends to bore me as it doesn't pose questions. It doesn't endure sustained scrutiny and it very rarely offers anything that one doesn't already know. Having said that, I do love gospel music, especially choral groups, but I feel that even with this form of music there is an inherent sadness, melancholy and a reliance on past sufferings which one accepts prior to the celebratory.

 

I think that my naiveté in the music making process simply obliged me to work in a visual way. It seems the most honest approach for me. I work and think epigenetically—in layers, organically and metaphorically. Ideas trigger other tangential but linked ideas, which in their turn suggest or connect other ideas, and so it goes on. Collage as a construct echoes this approach and I guess could describe most simply how both my visual and sonic works evolve.

Then, later in the interview:

What encouragement or advice do you have for other artists who wish to explore a completely different side of their creativity but are afraid to do so for fear of criticism or being misunderstood?

Do it and remember Beckett's other glorious axiom: "Dare to fail, but dare to fail better."

. . .

All arts aspire to the condition of music because music has such a vast vocabulary and in fact communicates in ways beyond that which can be expressed in words. As artists we search for a means to communicate that which we sense but not explain, that which is glimpsed through a fog of shifting shapes, half-understood, pregnant with unknown meaning.

We search for the thing that is searching for us.