The Listening Room
‘The Listening Room’ - 2024, oil on canvas, 1270x1000mm
This painting began as an exploration of music, not as sound, but as feeling. I imagined a space where someone could completely surrender to their favourite record: a room for listening, total immersion. Somewhere you could kick off your shoes, slide on a good pair of headphones, and evaporate into rhythm, melody, and memory. A refuge. But also, a playground. A place where friends could crank the volume to stadium rock levels and dance like crazies at a private concert of their own making.
When I started sketching ideas and asking people what that space looked like to them, the answers were wildly different. No two visions were the same. And that’s when the real subject of the painting emerged. Not the room, but the experience. The personal, unsharable, beautifully subjective journey we each go on when we engage with music.
We might all be hearing the same track, but what happens inside us as we do is impossible to compare. That mystery, how something so universal can feel so deeply personal, is one of the most profound and puzzling questions in philosophy. And it’s not just music. The same goes for any form of art. We stand before the same painting, hear the same notes, watch the same scene, but what we feel belongs to us alone.
That’s the nature of art. It doesn’t ask to be understood, only experienced. So don’t worry if your reaction isn’t the same as someone else’s. It isn’t supposed to be. Choose your record, press play, and be your own blue gorilla in the moment.
P.S. There are 18 references to bands and musicians in the artwork, plus a few rogue ones hidden in the details.
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