I wanted to make a colorful background and populate it with linear icons, a vision of something between Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miró: line drawings standing out against an alien landscape. I chose lemon yellow as my key color with the idea of adding reddish earth tones and a dash of green here and there. The […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I am trying to wean myself away from portraits of my brother Mike. Mike is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. Although I haven’t seen him is a couple of years, and sporadically before that, he is still in my head. One way to remove oneself is to abstract. One of my favorite abstract […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I’m back at home, in my comfy studio. My visit to the Norton Simon Museum is still fresh in my mind. I wanted to paint another portrait in a different manner than I have previously. I did use the same technique: A line for the nose, one for the mouth and two […]
I really enjoy the art of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Both artists taught at the famous Bauhaus and both have written about their philosophies. There is a compilation of Klee’s Bauhaus lectures and essays about art in two notebooks (The Thinking Eye and The Nature of Nature); Kandinsky also wrote down his ideas about […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: Two factors influenced my artwork today. First, one of my favorite artists, Paul Klee, described a way to ‘make visible’ one’s inner state was to take a pencil point ‘for a walk’. Although I’m not clear about how to translate my inner state to the paper, I believe the practice of ‘taking a point for […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I began today’s study simply: I applied several yellowish pigments to a completely wet watercolor paper. In Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he equates forms with colors. Yellow, to use today’s example, is one of the ‘keen’ colors that is consonant with a sharp, or triangular shape. I wanted to see what would happen […]
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 […]
Kandinsky describes a ‘spiritual triangle’ as one which is divided into unequal horizontal segments. The bottom segment is the widest and, as one approaches the apex, they get more and more narrow, with spirituality increasing with successively higher levels. Within the triangle is the world’s population. “Because the inhabitants of this great [lower] segment of […]
It must have been something I ate last night. I had a hard time swallowing and breathing last night and most of the day. I had planned another go at a Kandinsky-esque rule-based composition in my ‘time’ series, but I just didn’t have it in me. Today was more of a Paul Klee day. Klee’s attitude toward composition […]
Today’s watercolor experiment: I had a couple of ideas in mind for today’s composition. First, I had been thinking about revisiting the idea of how one looks at an old fashioned contact sheet. I brought this up in a previous post (Re-Inspection of Time). For clarity, here’s my example of a contact sheet from that post: Note […]
