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[Epigraph]
"White, therefore, has this harmony of silence,
which works upon us negatively,
like many pauses in music that break temporarily the melody.
It is not a dead silence, but one pregnant with possibilities... ."
~Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art
In an
academically-oriented town
like Boston, the new
exhibition season rolls in
in the Fall, in reluctant
harmony with its
relentless academic
calendar.
My own exhibition season
this year begins with a
pair of group shows, the
most notable of which
concerns a subject that is
bound to make a color
abstractionist's heart
beat more rhythmically.
It's entitled:
Harmony: Art and Music
This show takes place,
fittingly, in a historic
building of a former piano
factory in the South End
of Boston. I am told that
once upon a time, before
the massive project of
filling in part of the
Charles River basin in the
19th century, this factory
sat on the very shore, so
the freight barges could
sail right up to the
building to pick up baby
grands and uprights and
grand concert pianos made
of exotic woods, to
deliver their fancy
delicate loads to any
destination.
But back to the
exhibition, which features
three of my paintings.
They were created within a
year of each other, on
birchwood panels of the
same size, with shared
spatial concerns and
compositional
preoccupations. The
distinctions, however, are
also telling: the
comparative starkness and
greater textural
complexity in "The Minstrel Show (Intermission)" underscores the "softer" focus and freer coloristic expressiveness of the other two panels.
"The Minstrel Show (Intermission)", 40 x 30 in. (102 x 76 cm),
Acrylic & mixed media on wood panel, 2020
"The Day of Singing", 40 x 30 in. (102 x 76 cm),
Oil stick, acrylic & & mixed media on wood panel, 2020
In the Epigraph quote above, Kandinsky speaks of the many pauses that
create a musical composition. Finding and staying with that distinguishing
rhythm is what makes each of these paintings unique.
"Lightness of Being", 40 x 30 in. (102 x 76 cm),
Acrylic & mixed media on wood panel, 2021
The musical titles that go with these paintings are hardly accidental; rather,
they are revelatory of the vibratory language in which these paintings are
'written'. (In fact, in some languages, such as Russian, "to paint a painting"
is literally "to write a painting" -- "napisat' kartinu"!) The visual analogy to
a sheet of musical notation perhaps is not coincidental either. The pattern
thus created underscores the interval-based nature of organized
information and, broadly, of any deliberate creation.
You may have heard Walter Pater's deservedly famous dictum: "All art
constantly aspires to the condition of music." What you may not have been
given a chance to see, is the following full quotation in his original article of
1877*, where Pater fleshes out this elegant proposition:
"All art constantly aspires to the condition of music. … It is the art of music
which most completely realizes this artistic ideal, this perfect identification
of form and matter. In its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not
distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the
expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other… ." Pater
then sets an interesting task -- and a high bar -- for aesthetic criticism, as
he continues:
"Music then, and not poetry, as is so often supposed, is the true type or
measure of perfected art. …[T]he arts may be represented as continually
struggling after the law and principle of music, to a condition which
music alone completely realizes; and one of the chief functions of aesthetic
criticism… is to estimate the degree in which each of those products
approaches, in this sense, to musical law."
Yes, by the time Kandinsky was tackling music's ecstatic role in his own art,
Music has long been "in the air" as inspiration and aspiration for the Art of
Painting.
*Walter Horatio Pater (1839–94), Essay on "The School of Giorgione", Fortnightly Review, 1877.
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