Color which vibrates just like music, is able to attain what is most general and yet most elusive in nature.
– Paul Gauguin
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I came across this line that Gauguin had written in a letter to the poet Andre Fontainas and it made me think about how I often compare painting to music, how I try to find that rhythm, maybe the vibration to which Gauguin alludes, in my work that has the same effect on the viewer’s unconscious mind as does music. That thing that would make my work, like music, communicable across all boundaries. Something that would easily be absorbed as an emotional response without first having to dissect it intellectually, like music that you hearfor the first time and react to without thinking, often finding it still vibrating in your mind for days and weeks afterward.
It’s a grand aspiration and I am never sure if I ever reach that goal. But I do keep hoping and trying.
I chose the painting above to illustrate this post because I like the simplicity and harmony of it. Titled Ever, it’s a 15″ by 18 ” piece on paper that is as much an abstraction, with its spare forms and lines, as it is a depiction of reality. My hope is that the color and harmony of this piece creates a vibration or rhythm that overcomes the unnaturalness of it, allowing it to makean emotional contact before the mind finds some intellectual objection.
Again, a grand aspiration.
Reading back over this, I have to say that I don’t sit before my easel or table and ponder these concerns before I start to work. I often only think about these matters when I come across a line, like the one above from Gauguin, that makes me wonder about my own aspirations for my work, what they are and how they compare to the painters of the past whose work I admire. I guess I am looking for a commonality in our views that connects us somehow, even though our work may not reflect this bond.
Another grand aspiration.
Redtree Times 