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Two Octave Excercise

As a classical piano music student, I had to practice a daily routine of hand exercises to build strength and provide the vocabulary of technical facility necessary to execute the challenging compositions of this genre. One of those exercises was the playing of scales, arpeggios and melodic motifs in octaves. Sometimes the octaves are played within each hand, other times each hand plays a single line with the other hand playing the same line in parallel.

I created a set of painting exercises in octaves to help me build a vocabulary of technical facility with the paint brush and on the canvas. On this keyboard, the octaves are inverted to represent the opposing thumbs and fingers of the human hand when playing in parallel octaves, where the thumb of the right hand and the 5th finger of the left hand begin ascending patterns together.

One of a series

acrylic on canvas  30 x 20

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