how to paint like kandinsky

My artist sister sent a link to this short video from The Tate.  It's not quite what it claims, but that turns out to be useful.  Go ahead..   I'll wait.

 

Without a bit of background in the fine arts this isn't exactly a step-by-step how-to-paint guide.   For most of us it's somewhere between art appreciation and art creation.  It reminds me of learning physics as an undergrad.  You spend a few years learning bits and snatches thinking you're learning physics.  Silly you -  in reality it's just a little background.  Slowly you begin to focus on technique - mostly math - and come to think this must be physics.  It isn't, but you're beginning to get an appreciation.  You can go to serious academic talks without getting totally lost and you start to get the sense that this is much deeper than you had imaged. A talk might give a sense of how someone did something, but rarely offers much where the creative piece came from.    A few more years and you begin to get the hang of it - at least a small corner.  Back to the video.

 

I imagine art students would see some interesting hints.  I like what Sui said about her own inspiration.  That  led me to some notes from The Tate on Kandinsky.

Painted between 1910 and 1911, Cossacks is an expression of Kandinsky’s belief in the power of art “to awaken this capacity for experiencing the spiritual in material and in abstract phenomena.” The dynamic tension between abstract form and concrete content may be read as a manifestation of the wider conflict between the forces of political oppression – Kandinsky had been deeply moved by the strikes and upheavals in Odessa a few years earlier – and the hunger for spiritual rejuvenation consequent upon the rise of soulless modernity. Like his contemporaries Piet Mondrian and Henri Matisse, Kandinsky saw painting as an extension of religion, capable, as he wrote in his Reminiscences (1913), of revealing ‘new perspectives and true truths’ in ‘moments of sudden illumination, resembling a flash of lightning.’ The echo of the Ancient Greek writer Longinus’s notion of sublime speech, which similarly strikes like a bolt of lightning, is carried over into Kandinsky’s description of the spiritual mission of the modern artist. In his 1911 essay On the Spiritual in Art, he compares the life of the spirit to ‘a large, acute-angled triangle,’ at the apex of which stands the solitary artistic genius dispensing spiritual food to the multitudes below.

Impressively deep.

 

It turns out they've done a few of these of how-tos ..  If you want to move a bit beyond art appreciation, even though you may never try painting or printing, there's more here: print like Warhol, paint watercolor like Turner and cast like Whiteread.   They're quite wonderful and I hope they keep making these. 

 

A couple of interesting issues immediately come to mind.  How to you communicate at a variety of levels and why is art so important in unexpected areas?  Since I've written quite a bit about the first, I'll skip to the second.  What is the utility of art? 

 

I find visualization critical my own thinking - particularly at the playful stage that some might call the creative piece.  You get to the point where the questions become visualizations that you manipulate.  A mathematical expression might take the form of a visualization that you play with without formally solving it.  It's part of what some call intuition.  Sometimes these are on paper or a blackboard and sometimes they're in your head and you copy them, or at least their flavor, to move the court you're playing on. 

 

I've been drawing since I was a little kid and still will sit and sketch something on a tree trunk for an hour as exercise.  I'm guessing that the ability to visually focus, something art and photography can teach you, is central to improving your ability to visualize.  It's much more powerful than anything I've seen with a computer and I suspect is very useful in many disciplines. 

 

With all this practice you'd think I'd be an ok artist, but that isn't the case.  No complaints as the practice has undoubtedly shaped my neural connections that let me, for good or not, think how I think.  I believe there are rather deep connections between our perception of beauty and Nature and this can allow us to use visualizations as a rather powerful guide.  That's conjecture, but it keeps popping up over and over.  As a physicist friend says:  If there is a God, it's almost certain she's an artist. 

 

Others have noticed the impact of the visual arts on scientific thinking and a few physics and math programs recommend students take at least a semester of a class that involves drawing.  I'd like to see that practice expanded and have been trying to encourage my undergrad school to link with a nearby art institute.  STEM is only part of an education even if you're working in one of it's fields.  Adding a visual art or music (or .. ?)  may be essential if your goal is to be creative (whatever that means).  So many stories.  It probably doesn't need to be a fine art for everyone, but the current focus on narrowness in hopes of finding employment is approximately wrong. 

 

Comments

[Jheri]

I love this! I’m finally working as a designer. I recommend sketching and photography to learn how to see. I have a view camera I take out to compose images and think about them. I usually just look at the ground glass. No film. I see much better than I did d a few years ago.

[Lance]

Art in all of its forms are ultimately subjective, what you see and feel are different than what everybody else sees and feels, the artist puts what they feel on canvas or paper or whatever medium is chosen,

this is their spiritual interface with their material thoughts, the result is varied as much as the people that view it, I prefer to create art like "myself", even though Kandinsky is a fine artist you are an individual with your own thoughts and beliefs,

you may present something new and refreshing as seen through everyone else's eyes.