A couple of posts ago, I addressed the concept of a visual language, and placed pictograms (anthropomorphized alphabetic letters) in a pattern.  However, this missed the mark: my pattern is sequential.  In a visual language all symbols are presented simultaneously without obvious relationships among elements.

I am still trying to gather more information about visual language, but today I am concentrating on another aspect of Paul Klee’s work based on the some of the concepts explored in an essay by Alejandro Arturo Vallega called ‘Paul Klee’s Vision of an Originally Cosmological Painting’(1)

Klee described drawing a line as taking a point for a walk.  Vallega notes that Klee described an “irritated point” as one “that is about to go linear,” and that, like life itself, picture elements must have movement, or action.

I’ve often wondered, with my pen poised on the paper, “what do I do now?”  Klee has a solution.

“The instinctive realization that we can continue beyond the start finds confirmation in the concept of infinity, which reaches from the beginning to the end, and is not limited to the beginning alone, and which leads to the concept of circulation. In a circulatory process movement is of the very essence, and the question of the start thus becomes irrelevant.”

Klee (Nature of Nature pg 255) (2)

I interpret this to mean it does not matter which direction to begin as long as one completes a circuit.  (Clearly this does not apply to all works of art, even to all works by Klee… more investigation needed).

Below is an example of a circuit beginning (and ending) at an irritated point.

(1) Paul Klee  Philosophical Vision: From Nature to Art, John Sallis, ed.  McMullen Museum of Art, Boston 2012

(2) Ibid., 29