Mark the Music
Last week and the weekend brought multiple studio visits, all fruitful. I move forward, still step-by-step, but at least for the moment with a renewed confidence in my footing. As somewhat to be expected, I got in the studio less over the past week than I had hoped. We have two days off before the next wave of family visitors and I hope to use that time effectively.
What painting I was able to do I’m pleased with. Of the three I am currently working on, this one made a great deal of headway. I am excited aboout the lower hard edge. There’s so much synthesis going on at the moment, bringing in all of my influences and forging ahead with something that feels truly my own. I pulled out my copy of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art and was, as usual, blown away with the succinct manner of his writing and imagery. He begins the chapter on form and color with a terrific Shakespeare quote:
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affectations dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
(The Merchant of Venice, Act v, Scene I.)
The music in oneself. It struck me because there is such connection between abstract art and music. One wonders if the most appreciative audience contemplates the meaning of a symphony by Liszt, or simply surrenders to the feelings that listening to it produces. Picasso wondered why people did not ask what a bed of flowers meant, or what each sunset was about. Yet toward abstract painting we seemingly cannot silence the rational mind, that part which is tied to the literal and so often keeps our souls from lifting off the Terra.
What is there to a painting, after all? Form, color, composition and the plastic. No work of art is a strictly literal description of its subject, no matter how realistic. It is all paint on surface. Colors mixed to trick the eye to believe what it most wants to see. Kandinsky said that we cannot reproduce an art not of our time. Such efforts, will at best produce an art that is still-born…such imitation is pure aping.
The push to produce an art that is relevant; one that amplifies the whispers of culture as we are living in it, this is the only fertile origin from which real art can spring. We must speak of our time, to our time all the while knowing we may never be received in our time.
I am pushing color to a higher frequency. Each time it is more and more audible. The underlying fields of churning, undulating earth tones pull the picture inward, while the saturated pure colorforms push out into the consciousness of the viewer. Each color is so specific to the individual viewer, and thus resonates a universal tonality or vibration. Before the addition of these colorforms, there was only the Void. While I love those paintings of late 2006, I realized that people could not grasp them. Seemingly, the the human being needs a visual anchor to keep them afloat. But in those months I could not have foreseen the current manifestation.
I am preparing for my first foray into teaching in over a decade. I am co-teaching a freshman seminar with a friend/chemist. I have been silent about it until I was certain the class would make. I have mixed emotions going in.
Despite losing my Friday afternoons, I hope to get to NYC next month to check out some shows which will still be up. It should be a short, intense ride. I’m excited to be back up there after so long an absence.
You’re currently reading “Mark the Music”, an entry on Christopher Rico
- Published:
- 17.08.08 / 4pm
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- painting, spirituality, theory
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