In Newsweek (I found it by way of Arts & Letters Daily) there is an article about Kandinsky called Kandinsky’s Influence on Painting is Far-Reaching. It’s a delight. Apart from the author’s insight there are 11 paintings loaded into the presentation.  My favourite was Elizabeth Murray’s “Open Drawer.”

What the author (Peter Plagens) says:

There’s not an ounce of worry in the surreal, cartoony “Open Drawer,” at right. It’s almost gigglingly non-abstract: a big yellow hand opens a drawer with something that might be a brassiere hanging out of it. But the image also contains some serious painterly business: the drips against the empty canvas at the bottom alluding to Pollack, the drawer’s black void turning into brushstrokes at the side to remind you what every painting is made of. Would Kandinsky have approved? Probably-if he could get with the spiritual lurking in everyday life.

Apart from the discovery of a painter I had, until now, never heard of (not surprising really, I’m woefully ignorant about the visual arts) and the wonderful pictures I got to stare at along with Plagens’ interpretations of them, what I liked best about the article was that it made me remember reading Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane and how it effected my thinking.

I have long been interested in symbols as condensed elements of meaning, but I hadn’t really considered the elements of the shapes as evocative in and of themselves.  That is, I knew human beings invested meaning in shapes and colors.  I knew we obsessed over, worked with, and meditated about things in the world (both dimensional and abstract) until they were infused with codifications of our history and our minds.  What I hadn’t really considered was how the elements of symbols might effect us: that is, how we were evolutionarily predisposed to be changed by them rather than the other way around. Not that Kandinsky talked about evolutionary predispositions. He didn’t. Rather, what he did have to say made me think about it.

It was Kandinsky and his insights about point, line, plane and colour along with Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and her rule of uprightness (other posts) that got me interested in the rules of the senses: the rules by which the eye (or the ear, or the nose, or the inner-ear and our sense of uprightness) perceive, limit, order and assess the world.

If you don’t have synaesthesia, or another perceptual oddity, art is the thing. (Well, I suppose it is the thing even if you do.) It is, I think, an externalized form of playing with perception: moving from the center of our normal perceptual world to its edges and purposely stepping beyond. It’s one of the best ways I know to learn to experience the world differently, in a way that permanently enlarges the world which you can perceive.