Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinskywas an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting one of the first purely abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art school. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorshipat the University of Dorpat—Kandinsky began painting studiesat the age of 30...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth16 December 1866
CityMoscow, Russia
CountryRussian Federation
The spirit, like the body, can be strengthened and developed by frequent exercise. Just as the body, if neglected, grows weaker and finally impotent, so the spirit perishes if untended.
Color cannot stand alone.
It is essential that the painter should develop not only his eyes, but also his soul, so that it too may be capable of weighing colors in balance...
Drawing instruction is a training towards perception, exact observation and exact presentation not of the outward appearances of an object, but of its constructive elements, its lawful forces-tensions, which can be discovered in given objects and of the logical structures of same-education toward clear observation and clear rendering of the contexts, whereby surface phenomena are an introductory step towards the three-dimensional.
The eyes are hammers.
Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street... Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.
In the hierarchy of colors, green represents the social middle class, self-satisfied, immovable, narrow...
Color transmits and translates emotion.
The artist is not a 'Sunday child' for whom everything immediately succeeds. He does not have the right to live without duty. The task that is assigned to him is painful, it is a heavy cross for him to bear.
All methods are sacred if they are internally necessary. All methods are sins if they are not justified by internal necessity.
Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings.
An empty canvas is a living wonder — far lovelier than certain pictures.
As a picture painted in yellow always radiates spiritual warmth, or as one in blue has apparently a cooling effect, so green is only boring.
The life of the spirit may be fairly represented in diagram as a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest segment uppermost. The lower the segment the greater it is in breadth, depth, and area.