Cécile McLorin Salvant is a visual artist and Grammy Award-winning jazz singer. In this video for Art Assignment, she shares an art assignment that’s all about the human form and silhouettes. Additionally, Salvant speaks about some of her recent visual work such as embroidery and drawing. Salvant touches upon her connection between jazz improvisation and her playful renderings of figures in her visual art.
Speaking to her assignment guidelines and her own artistic practice, she said the following:
“The song is the person and my variation on it is the flower, or the butterfly, or whatever abstract weird shape that ends my variation. How can I really push it musically to the point of it being unrecognizable . . . How does it affect your perception to really work on exaggerating or making something really small? What changes when that happens?”
