🕹 Proximity - Painting Soho red with Kandinsky!

Meeting Kandinsky

Have you heard of a painter called Wassily Kandinksy?

Extract from https://artsandculture.google.com/story/QgUxxeY10_VADg

1. He had the gift of synesthesia. Kandinsky was capable of synesthesia, an involuntary neurological phenomenon by which a person perceives several senses as being associated. In Kandinsky’s case, the sense of hearing was associated with the sense of sight, sounds, and colors being intimately linked in his mind. He could therefore ” see music ” as he found himself following a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin.

2. He became an artist at the age of 30. In December 1896, Kandinsky left his homeland and moved to Munich with his wife, Ania Tchimiakina, in order to start a career as an artist. It was a radical move, a true departure. The artist was already 30-years old and left behind a respectable life, conforming to the conventions dictated by his family lineage.

3. He opened his own school in 1902: it was open to women. At the beginning of 1902, the Phalanx (group and school opposed to conventional and conservative art viewpoints) of which Kandinsky was president, opened a painting school in Schwabing. Kandinsky taught painting and drawing there. The school was open to women from its inception. This position was non-conformist and progressive, since, at the time, women were only admitted to the Society of Women Artists, an institution linked to the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, or to the evening classes of that Academy.

4. He was friends with Marcel Duchamp. European avant-garde made its official entry into the United States in 1913 at the Armory Show in New York. Kandinsky exhibited Improvisation 27, which artist and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz bought to defend him against criticism. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase was a scandalous success. Another scandal followed in 1917 when Duchamp presented a urinal claiming artwork status to the hanging committee of the Salon of independent artists of which he is a member: Fountain became history, formalizing the invention of the ready-made, a radical innovation which establishes an art of the idea and positions Duchamp in art history.

5. He was a member of the ” Blue Four” group The German Galka Scheyer, who emigrated to New York in 1924, was the founder of the Blue Four group. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”; 1911–14) and began completely abstract painting. His forms evolved from fluid and organic to geometric and, finally, to pictographic (e.g., Tempered Élan, 1944).

Here is a link to his Top 40 Paintings.

Let us listen to Mathew Ritchie tell us about Kandinsky.

The Math in Kandinsky

Here is a brief paper discussing the Math-Art of Wassily Kandinsky.

What are the Key Insights from this paper?

• A very spatial aspect to his paintings?
• Metaphoric Correspondence between Emotions and Colours/Shapes
• Do we use Similar Language?
• Geometry pervades our lives
• Proximity can be interpreted in many ways

Walking the Streets in Soho

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak

Are you thirsty? Would you like some water?

A Proximity Effect

Let us play this Vaccination Game.

Fun Stuff with Kandinsky

Let’s also become synesthetic, however temporarily, and make music with Kandinsky !!

CHROME MUSIC LAB:KANDINSKY This experiment is inspired by Wassily Kandinsky, an artist who compared painting to making music. It turns anything you draw – lines, circles, triangles, or scribbles – into sound.

Kandinsky Music Maker: Music by Painting

How to say, “You are standing too close to me?”

Can we ask Sting? https://youtu.be/KNIZofPB8ZM

Maybe not. There are better Models , may be!!