SOME paintings are meant to be appreciated in silence. Not this one. Called Unravelling µþ´Ç±ôé°ù´Ç, it is a bar-by-bar representation of Maurice Ravel’s iconic orchestral piece , created by the Canadian artist . It also happens to provide an intriguing window into the creative mind.
After Adams had completed the piece in 1994, it emerged that she was suffering from the neurodegenerative condition known as primary progressive aphasia. The disease later robbed Adams of speech, and eventually took her life. In its early stages, however, it seemed to unleash a flowering of neural development in a brain area that integrates information from different senses. Unravelling µþ´Ç±ôé°ù´Ç may be a beautiful symptom of a terrible disease, or so say a group of neurologists led by William Seeley and Bruce Miller of the University of California, San Francisco. And here’s the jaw-dropper: Ravel is thought to have suffered from the same condition, which may have drawn him to the repetitive themes that cycle through µþ´Ç±ôé°ù´Ç. As well as losing language, patients with progressive aphasia can develop repetitive behaviours.
Adams was unaware of this, and of her own condition, while working on Unravelling µþ´Ç±ôé°ù´Ç. Each of the painting’s vertical figures represents a bar of music, with its height corresponding to volume and the colour representing the pitch of the note that Adams found most interesting within the bar. Like the music, the theme repeats and builds to the point where a change of colour to orange and pink represents the key change that precedes µþ´Ç±ôé°ù´Ç’s dramatic conclusion.
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Though Adams had no obvious symptoms of aphasia at the time, MRI scans taken in 1997 suggest that regions of her frontal cortex involved in processing language were already starting to degenerate. By 2000, however, Adams’s speech was becoming laboured. She was diagnosed with primary progressive aphasia in 2002 by Dean Foti, a neurologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. After finding out about her paintings, he referred her to Miller, who has shown that some patients with progressive aphasia develop a passion for creating art.
This may be the result of enhanced function in parts of the brain normally held in check by the dominant frontal regions that the disease affects. In Adams’s case, brain scans reveal that regions involved in integrating information from different senses were unusually well developed. Miller suggests that as her language centres began to deteriorate (Brain, vol 131, p 39).
Today, Unravelling µþ´Ç±ôé°ù´Ç hangs in Miller’s office – a fitting location for a painting that has contributed to our understanding of the neural origins of artistic creativity.
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