Context Lecture Review

10/10/14

Lecture Review

In todays lecture we looked at abstract expressionism. Abstract expressionism emerged in the early 1940's and created stylistically diverse work that introduced new radicals and broke away from accepted conventions in art. There was a directional shift in focus from paris to NYC in america.
Abstract expressionism was first used in germany in connection with the artist Kandinsky.

Wassily Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely abstract works.Kandinsky's creation of abstract work followed a long period of development and maturation of intense thought based on his artistic experiences. He called this devotion to inner beauty, fervour of spirit, and spiritual desire inner necessity; it was a central aspect of his art.

Born in Moscow, Russia in 1866, Kandinsky grew up a boy fascinated by color. Eventually, he would liken the painting process to that of orchestrating a musical composition. He wrote:

Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

Kandinsky was said to have Synesthesia and this ws thought to have been the inspirational factor of his abstract art work.

In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme → color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently coloured. In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be "farther away" than 1990), or may appear as a three-dimensional map (clockwise or counterclockwise).

Only a fraction of types of synesthesia have been evaluated by scientific research. Awareness of synesthetic perceptions varies from person to person.is a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes.

While skeptics have long debated the legitimacy of Kandinsky’s synesthesia it seems to have played an undeniable, integral role in his life and artwork. He once described his discovery of the phenomenon – something that occurred during an opera performance in Moscow:

"I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me." -Kandinsky

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wassily_Kandinsky

This image shows an example of Kandinsky's work. The piece is very abstract and reflects this idea of Kandinsky having synthesesia.

We looked at other artists who experimented with abstract expressionism such as Jackson Pollock a European artist who moved to america and began creating paintings using dripping paint to display emotion and feeling in a less figurative way.

Mark Rothoko was another artist who made abstract creations that portrayed a mood and feel ing again with any figurative images.

This is an example of one of Rothkos painting in which he is portraying a feeling to the audience. He used space and colour to create a mood that the audience will then look at and interoperate in their own individual ways. This is the beauty of abstract art. The meaning of the painting is never ending as how each person will perceive that painting, gives new meaning to it individually and is still relevant even if that meaning is different to what the artist had in mind when creating the piece. 

To me i think this painting is creating a very uplifting mood and has a rather tranquil warm feeling about it due to the warm bright colours and the elevated shape within the frame of the painting. However it also has a small element of sadness to it as it represents a somewhat temporary state of beauty which to me is symbolised by the sunset looking appearance of the painting. And like a sun set is temporary this painting gives a feeling of present beauty which is made more precious by the feeling of being temporay (like with a sun set, eventually the sun will set and the view will no longer be there to look at).