Abstract Jellies

I’ve been reading about the history of abstract art. There seem to be as many theories and approaches to art as there are artists. How could that be otherwise? For the most part artists try to portray truths about reality. It is no coincidence that many different forms of art arose after Einstein’s theory of […]

Kandinsky and Autism

I’m reading The Bauhaus Group, by Nicholas Weber. I just finished the section about Paul Klee and started the one about Wassily Kandinsky.  Klee and Kandinsky were friends and were professors at the Bauhaus at the same time. Kandinsky’s urge to express his feelings Several of the passages about Kandinsky, at the start of the section […]

Simple Studies

I had this idea while I was sleeping. It wasn’t a dream; I was just thinking of ways to keep my watercolor studies simple but on point. I am interested in synesthesia, the phenomenon whereby some people automatically get two sensations for the price of one, so to speak. For instance a synesthete may hear a certain […]

Barking Up the Wrong Tree?

Self Expression I have been trying to figure out how to express my feelings thought the visual arts, specifically through painting. I assumed that abstract expressionism was the way to go. However, connecting of the emotions to the hand with the paint brush seems to require a big canvas: sweeping movements as a dancer would […]

Just Draw a Line

Advice For today’s experiment, I took some advice from Camilo (castiblanc.wordpress.com). His comments have been helpful in my quest to find ways to express myself in a more abstract way. Here is his process: “I draw lines in a paper. Just lines without sense. Then i begin to watch the relations between the lines and […]

Meditation as Calibration

Kandinsky It is common to think of colors as “warm” or “cold”, “exciting” or “relaxing”. The Russian-born painter and musician Wassily Kandinsky spent years painting abstract compositions, looking at the work of other artists and making note of the effect color had on him. [1]   However, he had an advantage that many of us […]

Memory

I’ve been told that there are three things that you lose when you get old:  your memory, your hair and…. I forgot the other one.  Funny, right?  Not so much.  Today I spent more than an hour trying to remember the name of the book I read about a woman who had such an incredible memory, […]

Mental Blindness

I just finished The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Dr. R.E. Cytowic[1], about synesthesia. He raised some extremely interesting topics. Although the primary focus of the book is about synesthesia, he mentions the importance of the ‘emotional brain’ – physically embodied by the limbic system – in all aspects of human life and experience.  One […]

Synesthesia

This is the neuroscience part of the blog I’m reading The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard Cytowic, M.D.[1] This book is about the phenomenon of synesthesia, where a sensory stimulus triggers sensations by several senses, such as a visual stimulus producing a sound. Dr. Cytowic describes an encounter with one of his friends who, […]

Blaming the Victim

I wonder how many of you have heard someone say, “You should have taken better care of yourself”, after you catch a cold. “What did I do to deserve this?” is the same question. This time it is the victim that blames him or herself. Why is it so easy to cast blame? Does it […]

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