Outcome

Artist: Vasily Kandinsky

For this project, I am assigned with the artist Vasily Kandinsky, a great Russian abstractive expressionism painter. He was born in 1866 and had experienced WWI. His paintings include mainly 6 themes, which are “horse and rider”, “landscapes”, “Apocalypes”, “landscape”, “music”, “geometry” and “scientific Imaginary”. For me, the most interesting theme is “music”. For Kandinsky, music is one of the greatest inspirations, so he tried to present music into paintings. He named his musical paintings with three categories according to music types: impressions, which are generated by impression from nature; improvisations, which are more spiritual; compositions, which are carefully designed.

His personal belief is that painting can be the total work of art, which is also known as “Gesamtkunstwerk”. From his point of view, the abstraction of painting can involve viewer fully into the image, together with the painting, becomes a complete art piece. In addition, he also believes that abstraction is also the only way to conduct confusion to viewers. Though as an abstraction expressionist, he still thinks content and form are equally important. Content can reach the pure essence of objects while abstraction can reach the pure inner resonance.

Work: Fugue

"Fugue" was created in 1914. The painting was inspired by music as its name suggests. Because I am particularly interested in Kandinsky's music-related paintings, I choose this great art piece to reproduce. Another reason is about this painting's name. Because its name clearly suggests the kind of music that inspires this art piece, so I can know what kind of music I need to reproduce this art piece in the way I want: I plan to directly reproduce it by the feeling inspired from listening to music. The main color is yellow, which makes the tone of picture warm. But we can find it grows cooler to the right corner because of black and green. Red and blue wonderfully fitting in the painting gives it more content and meanings. We don't feel boring in this picture but we can keep looking at it for hours. Though there are lots of dramatic and contrast colors in the painting, I can feel the inner harmony inside the painting. The lines on the top and middle of the painting also make the dramatic colors stay together with each other harmoniously. We can see lottos circles are used for composition. They are just so tender. From my point of view, this picture is just as beautiful as Fugue itself,  containing dramatically contrast but harmonious parts, which are enjoyable.

Response:

I find this painting is full of content, though it is abstractive. Every time I look at it, I can find something new, maybe is some color I haven't noticed before, or the changing lines and composition in the middle of painting. The painting just has so much information: colors diverse so much, including yellow, red, blue, black and white. The wonderful part is that there is hardly any transition between those colors but we still feel the painting is harmonious. The circle and tender composition makes it so harmonious and the best part is middle part. So may kinds of lines and shapes in there, which gives us full of surprise and freshness. From the yellow, I can feel life in painting. Because yellow goes together with green, there is no feeling of impatience or anger. All I can feel is a sense of growing and energy. When I feel too restless looking at the main part of painting, there is always some blue, black or green to chill me down, just like the fountain inside a dessert. In addition, the painting is just like Fugue itself, which contains lots of contrast pitches but they all corresponding to each other, making the whole music harmonious. I felt like being absorbed into the painting the very first time I looked at it.

Product

I used music visualizers to make this paint. Firstly, I listened to Bach's the Art of Fugue, and consciously try to took notes that I thought was impressive unconsciously.

And then, I used different visualizes from iTunes and took screen shot for each of notes for each visualizer. The following are just some of my process.

Individual visualizers' images(except the one that I use as background):

For each visualizer's image, I merge all layers and make screenshots in different time dissolving together. Then I got the final pictures for each visualizer. Then, I tried to organize them as beautiful as possible...(I really tried). Finally, I got my product. Yeah:) So this is a electronically produced, music-inspired abstractive expressionism art piece by Fred. (Applause)

Reflection:

This process was actually very fun. I really enjoyed it, except the part that I kept taking screen shots for hundreds of times. The first thing I find very impressive is that I understand why abstractionists consider the act of painting as part of the art. I used to think art piece is just the "object", the painting hanging on the wall, but now I realize that art is actually a whole process. The very important part is how I interact with materials that inspires me. Materials to paint are not only paints, colors, but including our experience, our inspiration, just like music, or some unnoticeable sights on the way home, etc. How we interact with those untouchable, abstractive materials is just as important as how we interact with paints and brushes. I can even make some (though naive) "music-inspired" art even without using brushes. For abstractive art, it is the idea how we express our experiences and how we conveys our ideas matter the most. I used to think abstractionism is just about pure beauty and dramatic feelings. Every time I went to museums I just stared at those abstractive art pieces. However, now I think to really understand those abstraction arts, people have to know about the artist, know about his experiences and the whole process of creating the art piece. Then, the whole art, including both the painting on the wall and the process of creating art, can be fully conveyed to viewers.