I came to painting through music. As a student at the Conservatory, I sometimes perceived the musical score as a painting. The distribution, on the white space of the sheet of music, of its notes, its figures of silence, its staves, its bars and frames, its clefs, arrows, spirals, circles, appogiaturas, its indications of hammered, brief, prolonged stops, the vertical and horizontal degrees of the sounds suddenly punctuated, in certain contemporary scores, by a dazzling splash of colour, all this made me want to paint. It seemed to me that on the musical page I had penetrated the arcane of pictorial space. I succumbed to this intuition, to this revelation as if it were a visceral need. I undertook to translate these rhythms, these sounds, these cries, these joys, these pains, these silences, these superimpositions, these diaphanous currents or these transparencies, because music contains them all. As it has its gestures. Its colour. Its chiaroscuro. Its climates. Like the pictorial work. Since I have been painting, I have found the gesture of musical writing. The whole range of nuances, of phrases, of its rhythms, of syncopations or counter-time. And the chromatic palette of tonality or atonality. All the magic signs of musical construction have been transformed. The sound figures have become those of pictorial language. They generate the substance and the forms distributed in the space of the painting. Of the work. Offered to reflection. In dialogue with the viewer. Music will have given birth to painting in me. Michel Morin February, March 2004 Born: 27 October 1933 in Montreal Died: 16 May 2011 lived in Saint-Sauveur-des-Monts until his death