Well, he's not exactly an illustrator, but I simply can't let the great man's birthday go by without tipping my hat in respect.
The illustrator Robert Fawcett studied Beethoven's notebooks and found their thematic notations surprisingly similar to an artist's conceptual sketches: they are both "notations of plastic linear ideas."
Fawcett said that abstract drawing "is probably as close to music as drawing can come." Enjoy these handwritten manuscripts as abstract art.
