Ab Major 9 - Research on Harmony - Variation 2

A small piano étude translated into color. The Ab Major 9 chord — Ab, C, Eb, Bb, G — appears here across nearly four octaves of spread voicing: from the deep blue-black of Ab1 and Bb2 at the base, through the warm russet accent of C3 at mid-register, opening progressively into the salmon-pink expanse of G4, and resolving at the luminous red of C5 at the apex. Each color zone is a chord tone at its proper register; the spread voicing is not depicted but enacted as vertical composition.
This painting belongs to my Synesthetic Explorations series, an ongoing practice of translating harmonic relationships into visual form. Register encodes brightness throughout: what sits low on the keyboard sits dark at the bottom of the paper; what rises high bleaches toward light. The spread voicing opens across the paper the way it opens across the keyboard — and the painting reads, from base to summit, as the chord unfolding in space.