Friday, May 21, 2010

Is Everyone Kandinsky?





I had no idea starting out where this would all lead. I did know that I loved Kandinsky's work from the time I was a very young artist. There was just something so lyrical (I keep going back to the same words) but it is true. It speaks to the inner child, and if you were a child at the time, it spoke directly to you. I was puzzled therefore how a major artist could be speaking directly to a little kid? It took a lifetime to realize that the genius of life is to never loose that youthful spirit.

In any case, in examination and discovery it was my intention to look at Kandinsky's work and draw some parallels in tools to how he worked. Never did it dawn on me to truly see the enormity of influence, Kandinsky had. (As in E - V - E - R - Y - O - N - E). While people salute Picasso for his genius you can see where Kandinsky's influence just permeated everyone. Its kind of funny actually when you see a painting of expressionists and say, "Why bother?" when you have Kandinsky. It is a poor regurgitation of the master. While copying is a form of flattery, where is the imagination and originality? By this time, its starting to get annoying to discover that the new idea of brilliance started with one man.

For this exercise I discovered a painting by Clyfford Still that is in the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo New York. I took a Kandinsky, cut the painting and turned it into black and white. I subsitituted some of the white area for the same color as Still and added just a few white gestures. - "Voila once again....." No originality.

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