For the artist Estelle Asmodelle, the boundary between painting and music dissolves. They are not separate pursuits, but two languages emerging from a single creative wellspring—a lifelong exploration of spontaneity, raw emotion, and the dismantling of form. While she is known first as a painter in the abstract expressionist tradition, her work at the piano is the temporal, auditory soul of her visual art.

Though her foundations are in classical piano, her true work has been a sustained act of rebellion against its conventions. She speaks of her method as ‘deconstructing’ music: carefully taking apart the familiar structures of harmony and melody until they become what she calls ‘ornaments or relics’. These fragments, freed from the weight of tradition, become the raw material for a new and profoundly personal vocabulary. It is a way of working that seeks to sidestep the intellect and connect directly with an intuitive, emotional core.

This philosophy found a unique stage in the late 1990s when she directed the Miscellaneous Musick Ensemble. This wasn’t a conventional orchestra; it was an avant-garde collective dedicated to spontaneous improvisation, deliberately taking their sound out of the concert hall and into the public sphere of art galleries and parks. And while her career has included periods of more conventional recording and commercial success, the pull towards this uncompromising artistic centre has always proven irresistible.

Her own sound is born from a remarkably broad palette of influences. The intellectual rigour of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, the deep melancholy of Shostakovich, and the classical grace of Mozart all coexist in her improvisational world. The result is a sonic landscape that is entirely unpredictable: at once alluring and comforting, at others daunting or deeply introspective. While some have likened her to a radical Keith Jarrett, the comparison only goes so far. Her work is sparser, less tethered to harmony, and more concerned with texture and atonality. It is a music that prioritises raw honesty over the need to be pleasant.

Ultimately, Estelle’s musical art finds its truest home in dialogue with her visual art. It is far more than accompaniment. The gestural mark on a canvas finds its echo in a percussive strike of the keys; a layered wash of colour finds its voice in a sustained, atmospheric chord. In these moments, her music returns to its organic essence: a performance not just of sound, but of fine art itself, where the ephemeral act of creation is the final, finished work.

Estelle is a multi-award winning artist with works in numerous collection world-wide.