“These cheerful figurations floating against an atmospheric, milky-blue ground are typical of Kandinsky’s vocabulary of forms during his Paris years. Their similarity with the forms invented by early cultures is astonishing.” – Ulrike Becks-Malorny
Kandinsky Bleu de ciel 1940
This blue field of floaters is another greatest hits painting from my childhood. My father displayed a precious poster of it in his office. As we moved around damage diminished its effect–but the value which my father attached to it made a formidable impression on me. After about two years of using floaters in drawings and paintings I have realized that they are not my invention. I am copying them form a subconscious memory of this Kandinsky painting! Even better, I find in Kandinsky’s writings justification and sympathy for my private faith that in combining elementary forms and marks one may evoke the most essential subtleties of life.
Kandinsky wrote in On the Spiritual in Art:
“The similarity of the inner mood of an entire period can lead logically to the use of forms successfully employed to the same ends in an earlier period. Our sympathy, our understanding, our inner feeling for the primitives arose partly in this way. Just like us, those pure artists wanted to capture in their works the inner essence of things, which of itself brought about a rejection of the external, the accidental.”
Floaters is my term for clusters of quick and varied marks with which I punctuate open space in my visual compositions. I named them out of necessity because little guys made me sound goofy. I tend to imbue everything with personality as a result of my world-view that consciousness is the basis of reality and that matter is merely a thin crust on top of it. Most people don’t want to think about that so I just call my little guys floaters now. FYI a floater to a vertical line is a dangler.
Wassily Kandinsky’s chaos was not chaotic. His most fanciful abstracts–at least late in his career–are as tidy as the Mérode Altarpiece. He is therefore an inspiration to all the contemporary artists whose process and imagery are simultaneously spontaneous and restrained. His visual ideas are fresh and intuitive, but his heart is steady and his craft refined.
Whitney Wood Bailey and Bernard Dumaine (who I quote in other posts) work in that mode. Many abstract artists do. Melissa Gwyn, my college teacher describes herself that way in her bio. Granted, she paints the illusion of a light source into many works, which demonstrates extreme determination for order.
I imagine my floaters to be very fancy. I just start out at extreme cubism and take it from there so the viewers never know how lovely my subjects are in life, or in my imagination as reality may have it be.
I knew as a child that art appreciation was a substantial gift from my father, but I couldn’t understand how deeply he sowed it in my subconscious. When I see this painting of floaters I feel like they are my floaters, like Kandinsky captured them from my imagination and pinned them to a blue table cloth on a little table like butterfly bodies on exhibit.
Remembering the tattered poster in my father’s office, and cold sunny Berkeley days of browsing hundreds of posters in floor to ceiling racks at the Reprint Mint while he drank espresso and ate baklava at the Cafe Med across the street–just remembering makes me feel the art. I feel the warmth of Monet’s overgrown garden on sunny afternoons, Kandinsky’s spontaneous initial gestures, and the calm and wonder which have overcome my cold anxious heart many times during my observation of great works of art. Art soothes my heart; it calms my nerves and I love it so very much. Thank you Dad.
Sara Sushila Avery 