An artist has the privilege of communicating with you visually. He sometimes wants to share his beliefs in a few words.
The new ‘Visual Grammar’, developed by the European avant-garde of the 1920s, particularly the Russian avant-garde, – specifically by Wassily Kandinsky, as well as the classical heritage from ancient Greece to the Renaissance – is a springboard for my own research in the art.
What I do is build a composition on that rung on the basis of visual grammar, shaped by the classical and modern schools, and then fill it with content that is more emotional than intellectual, at this stage forcing the rational tools to give way to the intuition. It is like a rigid skeleton surrounded by soft living tissue.
I do believe that the spiritual-ideal-objective model forms our real Reality.
So-called “realism” is a poorly defined term commonly attributed to art focused on depicting visible surfaces of material objects. This is an indication and the result of an incomplete, even defective mental horizon, a primitive materialistic vision of reality reduced to a small fraction of the physical world, that only fraction that can be seen or touched.
I should point out here that many great works of art tagged with this word do not fall into this ill-defined category.
A pure abstract art, which is closer to me because it deals with a part of Reality that is more important than matter, specifically ideas and pure forms, also seems deficient to me. I believe that the total elimination of material objects as a class from painting not only impoverishes the artist’s ‘toolbox’, but is the consequence and indication of a one-sided approach to (the) Reality, this time purely idealistic, they almost coincide with the concept of Plato, who saw the changing physical world as a poor and decaying copy of a perfect one.
Yes, abstract art certainly delivered great masterpieces to humanity in the 20th century. And I cannot help but agree with Roger Fry’s statement: “The shape of a work of art has its own meaning and the contemplation of the shape in and of itself arouses in some people a special emotion that does not depend on the association of the form with anything else”. But that doesn’t mean that a self-sufficient shape can’t become a recognizable object.
By the way, Roger Fry coined in 1912 an original definition of a very widespread term, Visual Music, to describe the work of Kandinsky, that is, the translation of music into painting.
As for intuitivism, or any theory that claims that the creative process is solely an act of genius, spontaneous, and purely emotional, it wouldn’t even be worth discussing if it weren’t such a widespread assumption. Personally, I have heard from several artists, an art critic, and several art dealers that the intellectual and physical aspects of the creative process (ie ideas and techniques) are just boring constraints and an inevitable evil for creativity. I think this started as an opposition to the dry and really demeaning academicism or ‘classicism’ of the mid-19th century. It may have started when some of the leaders of the Impressionist movement openly rejected the “old grammar”, emphasizing the importance of a direct impression and an artist’s spontaneous emotional reaction to that impression in a creative process. But almost all the artists of that period had a strong ‘classical’ background prior to this rejection; they inherited all the goods that that domain possesses, they inherited the basic visual grammar even at subconscious levels, which cannot be said of many of their followers in the 20th century, who even today continue to question the importance of basic training in visual arts, as well as the power of the analytical and deductive component in artistic creation.
The avant-garde movement of the first third of the century arrived like a breath of fresh air, filling the void left by an already dead academicism and degrading impressionism. He not only restored the position of intellectual tools in the arts, but also dramatically expanded the frontiers of the visual arts to unprecedented levels. I would like to emphasize here, that very similar and radical processes were taking place in the same period all over the world in the social spheres, in science and industry, in architecture and literature and, of course, in music.
With that being said, I’d like to summarize what all of this means to me and my art:
1. A solid abstract and, if necessary, mathematically described base of the composition is essential (to be present) in my work.
2. An object must be presented in my artwork, as I do not share a purely idealistic (Plato-style) approach to (the) Reality, which, in my opinion, ultimately leads to the mental Discreation of the world.
3. My work has to be a fusion of both aspects, ideal and material, combined by a third – spiritual force.
In this sense, the music, which is very abstract, and the musicians with their beautiful instruments, which are so “real”, are perfect subjects for my exercises. Furthermore, music and the visual arts have a lot in common.
Rhythm – it’s very obvious: duration / length / frequencies, including and forming (or formed by) negative spaces / pauses / absence / silence – all are common to both fields.
Ratios – harmonic ratios and derivatives of them, commonly described in mathematical terms, starting with very basic, discovered by Pythagoras- 1:2, 2:3, 3:4, 1:1- specifically discovered in the acoustic/musical territory (for Please note these are basic canvas ratios you can buy at an art supply store) and then move further to the Fibonacci series which has its limit at the irrational golden ratio.
The temperature (hot/cold) of sounds and colors. This idea is still considered controversial, but it is obvious that sounds and colors can be warmer or cooler. Less obvious is an exact scientific correlation between them.
Movement – ascending, descending, elliptical, etc. Musicians don’t need an explanation for this, and neither do artists. Take a look at my study of upward and downward movements in the elliptical composition of the first image on my home page, titled “Trio”.
All of these categories sound (or look!) familiar to both musicians and visual artists, don’t they?
We can talk about sounds and background colors, that a sound is like a ray that emerges from a particular starting point and vanishes, or as part of an endless line that goes from eternity to eternity. We could mention the intensity/saturation of tones in both fields, we could dedicate a chapter to the theory of contrasts, for example between a ‘low’ and ‘deep’ continuous sound or shape and a sharp ‘trace’ of a sound or a paintwork.
Regarding the human ability to see sounds and hear colors, I would once again recommend Vasiliy Kandinsky’s Synesthesia.
Another fascinating subject is the concept of counterpoint (known as Contrapunkt), which defines the relationship between two or more different parts of a piece, which are somewhat independent, for example in rhythm, but are interdependent in harmony. This powerful instrument, in my opinion, has been much less understood, appreciated and used in the visual arts than it has been in music.
I drew these parallels at the very basic or fundamental level for both arts. But, as part of Life, they are constantly changing (I hate the term ‘dead nature’ or ‘dead nature’, because life cannot be still or ‘mort’ by definition), developing, progressing or, unfortunately, regressing. I find a lot in common between modern scientific thought (relativistic theory, quantum theory, expanding universe model, string theory, etc.), modern art.
Ultimately, I’m trying two things: to explore reality, including but not limited to its ‘visible’ fraction, and to participate in shaping it. This, I believe, is ultimately the essence of any creative process.
“Therefore we will borrow all our Rules for the Finishing of our Proportions, from the Musicians, who are the greatest Masters of this Class of Numbers, and from those Things in which Nature shows herself most excellent and complete.” – Leon Battista Alberti (1407-1472)
I’m an artist.
I have the privilege of communicating with you visually.
Selected works from my ‘Shapes of Music’ series are featured on the Music Artwork site.