In Circles

Kandinsky! I jumped at the chance to try my hand at creating an artwork in his style again (in fact, I have done an oil painting in his style before as a birthday present for my mother. We're both fans of his work.)  - actually, I'm glad we have an undeniably visual-art assignment this time round. It's the sort of stuff I enjoy the most, although I do sort of wish we had more artist styles to pick from (maybe even pick our own, less-famous but favourite ones?). Ah well. Onward!

Vasiliy Kandinsky 

The following information is taken from a variety web sources, which may or may not be reliable (Wikipedia).

He is credited with painting one of the first purely abstract works - I read as much from my art museum visits this past summer in Germany. What especially intrigued me about his works is their similarity to music, in my mind. And indeed, Kandinsky likened painting to the composition of Music, saying "Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul". His sensitivity to colour and delicate early portrayals of scenery in particular are what charms the observer.

Kandinsky was successful as an art theorist, and taught both art design and theory in Germany, later moving to France due to Nazi influence.

Several Circles

To be honest, it is very difficult to pick any particular painting out of the rich selection before me. But I suppose that when one says "Kandinsky", what comes to mind are the timeless floating circles of Several Circles, or the great, sprawling Composition pieces from his later work. I particularly like the geometric style of his works like Unbroken Line, but I have to say, something keeps drawing me back to the circles. This is rather troublesome for me, because the atmosphere and aura of Several Circles seems impossible to recreate for me. If I mess up, it'll simply look like a haphazard collection of digital tool applications that took no thought or effort. But I want to give it a shot, because the oil painting I did for my mother was already in the style of his geometric works, and I don't actually care much for his more chaotic works, or the representational ones closer towards his move into abstract expressionism.

From the Guggenheim page, this is what there was to read about Several Circles: The importance of circles in this painting prefigures the dominant role they would play in many subsequent works, culminating in his cosmic and harmonious image Several Circles. “The circle,” claimed Kandinsky, “is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.”

I can't say I really get what he's on about, but some of the words used there do call out to me. Words like "eccentric", "cosmic", and.. I keep wanting to use the word "timeless". In Several Circles, it seems as though the circles are moving - slowly oscillating, or sliding in and out of focus. This is the quality of the painting that would be the hardest to capture

Attempt

The piece started out rather promising, I think, but towards the end it became clear that the work was becoming more crowded and messy rather than composed. I wanted to combine features from both his works depicting abstract circles and his geometric works - mainly, the colors from the latter. And although I admired the universality and impression of cosmic impermanence of Kandinsky's abstract pieces, my mind would stray to mundane, everyday things in life instead while making the piece. The circles began to symbolize different things as I worked on it, and the swaying, timeless effect of Several Circles eluded me. In fact, if I had to name my imitation, I would call it something suggestive of a personality, like "A Generally Happy Person", for example. It's still abstract, but not quite all-encompassing like Kandinsky's work feels.

This is sort of random, but I happen to think that the music from Transistor fits his works rather well. I was listening to several soundtracks while working on the recreation. I particularly recommend Smoke Signals and, of course, In Circles as accompaniment.

Reflection

Kandinsky was a deeply spiritual and sensitive artist with a highly delicate sense of colour - and quite frankly, I am rather not. Certainly I don't have much care for spirituality and the like, and maybe that's the sort of thing you need to give your paintings a special something, an extra kick or who knows what. 

Certainly using actual oil paints would have helped create a more convincing texture in the artwork, but I had only so much time. My recreation was done with a tablet and Adobe Photoshop CS6. Relatively fancy tools, actually, but oil is more suitable for something like this. Some circles were drawn with the help of the software, and some freehand - no doubt in oil painting the uniform application of oil paints across a canvas surface into a perfect circle would be far more impressive, but some extent of the style was captured, I think. The weakest part of the piece is clearly the composition of the circles - and the clear impression of a frame at the edges by the stronger colors perhaps seems to cage the rest of the content in somewhat, whereas in Several Circles the elements seem free to move about as they please. 

Lastly, the issue with digital artwork is of course, the mixing of the colors. There's something very intuitive about mixing oil paints, but digitally the idea is harder to grasp for me. I can still select matching colors and generally get the hue I want, but the resulting effect is never quite as I imagined. This is probably because I have only a rudimentary grasp of color theory (Kandinsky, I can imagine, was a master of color theory) and still lack much practice with colored artwork.

I do like Kandinsky's works, but I confess that I often feel rather skeptical regarding abstract artwork, even if not less-traditional ones (I highly recommend the "I could do that" video in Sarah Bien's project, which I showed her in an attempt to convince her that art is more than technical skill - than beautiful scenery or naked ladies on a canvas being collected by the disgustingly wealthy). 

That said, I could do with some feedback too. If you glean some meaning or feel any sort of reaction towards my recreation, I'd love to hear it. Maybe it'll help me understand how this works.