Music competition: "In the Name of Salt"
The "first edition" of The Salt Queen Foundation's "In the Name of Salt" music competition, " a musical-artistic celebration of Bettina Werner's twenty years of creating with salt" was announced over the weekend. Here's what the Foundation says about it:
Salt has an incredible history: it has added extra flavor to language, religion and international trade through the centuries. For the past twenty years, Italian artist Bettina Werner, American by adoption, has built her international career working with crystals of salt, creating paintings, sculptures and installations, and now this elemental gift from our beloved oceans will become the liaison between visual art and music. To commemorate her twenty-year anniversary, Werner, the founder of The Salt Queen Foundation based in New York, is celebrating with a music competition.In ancient times the muses, the goddesses who inspired poetry and song, were invoked at the beginning of an epic poem or classical story to grant inspiration to the artist. In the same way, Bettina Werner will unite music with visual art in the Salt Queen Foundation's song competition "In the Name of Salt", a unique artistic collaboration in which the songwriter/composer will create a song inspired by salt, which in turn will be the inspiration for a salt painting by Werner. This work will be the physical manifestation, through color and texture, of both salty muses. In her paintings, created with a textured colorized salt technique, the salt, the muse of artist Bettina Werner, becomes music on canvas, a path through the eyes to the heart, and fills the soul with color. She explains the motivation behind this extraordinary competition:
I BELIEVE music acts as a shield, surrounding us with protective energy, since it bathes you in shimmering light that deflects away negativity...just as salt does! There is a connection between painting and music. When I'm painting in the studio, I listen to music and sense the waves of colors emanating with the vibrations, and I believe these waves can be felt by sensitive people. The colors on the canvas are related to the colors in the music, and I think it would be amazing to work listening to music that is inspired by salt."
- Bettina Werner
The application deadline is September 5th. Songwriters' submissions will be judged by an international panel and the Grand Prize Winner and 17 finalists selected by October 2, 2006.
