‘Hey, Mark, nice pictures — just noticed them,” dryly remarked writer and (last Friday) singer Amit Chaudhuri. Visual artist Mark Rowan-Hull smiled. It was, after all, 80 minutes into their joint show at The North Wall arts centre and there were already three canvases and three Perspex sheets daubed with paint on stage.

This was an unusual evening of music and art, with Rowan-Hull (who hears music in terms of colours — a condition called synesthesia) painting before a small but enthusiastic audience to the sounds and songs of Chaudhuri and his tight band. Their aim, we gathered, was “to treat music as a sound to be reconstituted in the context of other music”; specifically described as not ‘Fusion’, it was very much Western standards and even pop, heavily overlaid with raga-style singing and expert tabla playing (Hanif Khan tapped impressively while pianist Bart Dietrich and guitarists Adam Moore and Paul Williams interpreted versions of Summertime, On Broadway, Sympathy for the Devil and the theme music to All India Radio, among others.) Meanwhile, Rowan-Hull, often with five paintbrushes in his hands, went about his art on a stage just about lit well enough to show off what he was doing. There is little point in discussing his style: that is all a matter of his own personal visual interpretation of whatever music he is hearing at any given moment.

Thus we would have broad sweeps of green and blue, stripes of virulent red (could be vertical or horizontal), delicate quivering ripples of grey. On a couple of occasions, when working with canvas, he poured water gently. An especially interesting part of the experience was watching him facing us through the Perspex as he painted (and, of course, we were seeing the back of what he was creating!).

Rowan-Hull didn’t hurl or splash paint in wild-man fashion: there was clearly vision throughout — his unique vision — at all times. And Amit Chaudhuri and his players were equally clear with their clever music.