Peter Benjamin Graham - New Epoch Art Notation

New Epoch Art Notation

New Epoch Notation Painting is a form of Visual music based on traditional visual media, pioneered by Peter Graham between 1964 and 1987. At its core is New Epoch Art Notation, a conceptual painting notation designed to encode the visual language of pure visual images, while maintaining an emphasis on the physical challenges of painting. The purpose of New Epoch Art Notation is to enable the concise encoding of painting instructions for complex visual images, without the need for pictographic sketches or conventional written instructions. The notation system separates the act of conceiving an image from the act of painting. The score produced in effect becomes the 'subject' of any paintings produced, or 'performed'.

After Peter's death in 1987, his sons Philip Mitchell Graham and Euan Benjamin Graham completed his work and field tested the notation system in a wide variety of public venues. Many other artists have contributed to the development of NEA notation, including the Melbourne born painter and printmaker Paul Cavell

Peter called his invention Notation Painting for many years but in 1985 decided to change it to New Epoch Art. The name 'New Epoch' is a reference to a quotation from Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art:

'To each spiritual epoch corresponds a new spiritual content, which that epoch expresses by forms that are new, unexpected, surprising and in this way aggressive... We are fast approaching the time of reasoned and conscious composition, when the painter will be proud to declare his work constructive. This will be in contrast to the claim of the Impressionists that they could explain nothing, that their art came upon them by inspiration. We have before us the age of conscious creation, and this new spirit in painting is going hand in hand with the spirit of thought towards an epoch of great spirituality'