Do Or Die Artwork
Eric Chiang
The Tenth Symphony - Beethoven Wrote On My Heart mvt. ii
After listening to Beethoven’s 9th symphony at age 13, I was crazily inspired to create art. I exhausted myself in learning music composition and painting, and in parallel relentlessly convincing my parents to support my training for an artist career and begging the teachers to spend more of their time critiquing my music composition and artworks.
Into high school, I saw all doors to an artist career were closed. No support, no critique for my music and artworks creation from the teachers, no hope I could even do anything art-related. Sometimes I was depressed to the brim of ending my life. Then it was the words from Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament, written when he was in despair over his increasing deafness and his contemplation of suicide, that came to rescue. He wrote “… I came near to ending own life – only my art held me back, as it seemed to me impossible to leave this world until I have produced, everything I feel it has been granted to me to achieve…” I felt like hitting by a lightening of inspiration and hope. This has been sustaining me through 30 years of detour in non-creative work. And I have been tenaciously creating art after this detour.
My paintings “The Tenth Symphony— Beethoven wrote on my heart,” reflect how much I owe him for my life of creation. I used my own music manuscripts of chamber & orchestral pieces written in my teenage years as the background textures of the world Beethoven inspired me.
12”x16”x2”
Oil on my own music manuscripts on canvas
NFS
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