Where art and making meet writing, Vassily Kandinsky from “Reminiscences”
Sometimes I like to think about writing and how there is similarities between it and creating art (Art, in this context, is not limited to a specific medium or form, but in the way it interacts in everyday life). Each reader will focus on something different to make an association.
When I was thirteen or fourteen, I bought a paintbox with oil paints from money slowly saved up. The feeling I had at the time — or better: the experience of the color coming out of the tube — is with me to this day. A pressure of the fingers — and jubilant, joyous, thoughtful, dreamy, self-absorbed, with deep seriousness, with bubbling roguishness, with the sigh of liberation, with sensitive unstableness of balance came one after another these unique beings we call colors — each alive in and for itself, independent, endowed with all necessary qualities for further independent life and ready and willing at every moment to submit to new combinations, to mix among themselves and create endless series of new worlds. Some lie there as if already exhausted, weakened, petrified, as dead forces and living memories of bygone possibilities, not decreed by fate. As in struggle, as in battle, fresh forces pour out of the tube, young forces replacing the old.
In the middle of the palette is a world of the remnants of colors already used, which wander far from this source in their necessary embodiments on the canvas. Here is a world which, derived from the desires of pictures already painted, was also determined and created through accidents, through the puzzling play of forces alien to the artist. And I owe much to these accidents — they have taught me more than any teacher or master. Many an hour I studied them with love and admiration. The palette, which consists of the elements mentioned, which is itself a “work” — and often more beautiful than many another work — should be valued for the pleasures which it offers. It sometimes seemed to me that the brush, which with unyielding will tore pieces from this living color creation, evoked a musical sound in this tearing process. Sometimes I heard a hissing of the colors as they were blending. It was like an experience that one could hear in the secret kitchen of the alchemist, cloaked in mystery.
I learned to battle with the canvas, to come to know it as a being resisting my wish, and to bend it forcibly to this wish. At first it stands there like a pure, chaste virgin with clear gaze and heavenly joy — this pure canvas which itself is as beautiful as a painting. And then comes the willful brush which first here, then there, gradually conquers it with all the energy peculiar to it, like a European colonist, who pushes into the wild nature, hitherto untouched, using axe, spade, hammer, and saw to shape it to his wishes. I have gradually learned not to see the resistant white of the canvas, to notice it only for instants (as a control), instead of seeing in it the tones that are to replace it — thus one thing slowly followed another.
Painting is a thundering collision of different worlds, intended to create a new world in and from the struggle with one another, a new world which is the work of art. Each work originates just as does the cosmos — through catastrophes which out of the chaotic din of instruments ultimately create a symphony, the music of the spheres. The creation of works of art is the creation of the world.
— Vassily Kandinsky (1866–1944)
