And I do

The other night, I attended a lecture on Wassily Kandinsky, first known abstract painter.  I have seen/known his paintings but known nothing about the man.

Fascinating - his movement from figurative painting to abstract and the journey that took him there - a spiritual journey, an attempt to express what he believed could not be expressed through figurative art.

When he saw Monet’s “Haystacks”, he was moved, puzzled, and changed – when he realized that the haystack was not thing, it was simply the container not the content.

And yet…Kandinsky still used form (circles, lines, points, color) to express his ideas, impressions, inner workings of the soul.

What is happening when we/I create art?  My oldest daughter has her master’s degree in architecture from Yale University.  When she was very young but old enough to hold a crayon, we would spend Saturday mornings at the coffee table drawing – in wonder at the pure joy of color and movement and expression.

Why paint and hang it on a wall?  Beauty? Admiration? Adornment?  Expression of the human soul?

Down the street from where I am staying, a hotel has allowed an artist to cover its outside wall with a painting of a mariachi playing a trumpet.  It is a temporary installation.  In the room, I am using as an office hang two pastel paintings, a folk art painting of birds on handmade paper, a framed talavera tile over the desk, and a collage of bits and pieces (even cut out circles of Kandinsky’s circles.  What is it? What is it that we are doing?

I think I paint because I want to paint, a certain need or hunger to do so; it gives me energy.  In the midst of it, I am taken out of myself or somewhere else.  Time collapses.

A Child of the Light, 16 x 20, oil on canvass, 2014

Perhaps one could do it with one’s work (if not demanded) or gardening or writing or building something.  Could the same be said with sitting quietly, in silence, contemplating without images? Could it be weaving, wood-turning, glass blower, blacksmithing, and on and on?  Yes.  Of course.  But some of these are utilitarian: clothes, blanket, tools, furniture, pots, glasses, etc.  But what of pure art?

Writers convey the story of being human; and we are to share in knowledge of events and people, learn more than we could alone.  Poetry and song tell and retell the human experience.  But what of pure art?  Some has surely been to tell story, history, myth, especially before printing or photography and, now, social media.  But now when a photograph is able to be sent immediately to innumerable people, saved, re-configured, cropped, recolored, enhanced, vintage-fied, what of that?  What role does the artist as painter serve?  Conveyor of what?

Perhaps it is for no other reason than to celebrate or give expression to life or emotion, depths of the soul.  Odd creatures we are.  Created, made; desiring to create, to make; and we do.  And I do.

Kandinsky once wrote:  “The true work of art is born for the ‘artist’: a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation.  It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.”

He also wrote: “Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and... stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to 'walk about' into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?”

What more do you want?