Today’s watercolor experiment:

Again, I had to stop reading Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art to try out some of his hypotheses. I’m fairly certain that to Kandinsky, his view of the spiritual nature of form and color was not hypothetical. For example, he says that ‘keen’ colors such as yellows are naturally suited to sharp forms, such as triangles and blues naturally fit with round shapes.  He did however, seem to be open to the idea that dissonant combinations have a place in the design of paintings (i.e., yellow colors bounded by a circular forms and blues filling out triangular forms).

I drew three interrupted circular forms and filled the interruptions with points of triangles. The yellow circle accepted a blue triangle while the blue was pierced by a yellow triangle. Blue met yellow a little bit of the way outside the yellow circle, where a they made a slight green transition.

I ruined the symmetry by introducing red, the third primary color into the third acute form. None of the sharp forms were completed by pencil lines, but rather by color transitions (i.e., blue-to-green-to-yellow; red-to-blue; red-to-green; red-to-yellow. [note: the trailing edge of the red did not mix substantially in transition with the other colors]). The circular forms were also incomplete and their internal colors were not bounded.

Keen and Round Colors
9″:x12″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

In contrast to both the colors and shapes, I bounded the yellow-pierced blue circle with orange, its complement and the red triangular shape with a green, made up of a mixture of the yellow and blue pigments already used. I made no attempt to impose boundaries on the complementaries aside from their abutment with the circular and triangular forms. Their distal edges faded away or were bounded by the edge of the universe (i.e., the edge of the paper).