Nature, perception, light and color

It's strange, years ago I loved Klee's painting Ad Parnassum intensely. I was looking at it again and realizing what I've been painting lately is strikingly akin to this, on so many levels. How fascinating to see this--like a sudden mirror. I don't know if it has been subconsciously influencing me or whether I am just in a very similar place. Perhaps both. Parnassus was the mountain where the muses dwelt, and it was also the location of the oracle of Delphi, where the Pythoness, the priestess of Apollo (though long before that she was the oracle of the earth goddess) sat on her tripod within the mountain prophesying.

Now I really want to explore what Klee was up to with this technique. The ideas about nature, perception, and color and the kind of experimentation that Klee and others were up in the early part of the century was once really was compelling to me and I find that it's starting to happen all over again. It's quite interesting because it also intersects with Goethe's ideas about perception and observation that Stephen Harding speaks of in his book Animate Earth as well. But it is the centrality of color that fascinates me the most.

Traveling toward that universe . . . the pilgrimage to the mountain, the world of inspiration and vision . . .


"A turning point in Paul Klee's career was his visit to Tunisia with Auguste Macke and Louis Molliet in 1914. He was so overwhelmed by the intense light there that he wrote: Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever. That is the significance of this blessed moment. Color and I are one. I am a painter. He now built up compositions of colored squares that have the radiance of the mosaics he saw on his Italian sojourn." http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/klee/

Robert Delaunay, letter to August Macke, 1912
"Direct observation of the luminous essence of nature is for me indispensable. I do not necessarily mean observation with palette in hand, although I am not opposed to notations taken from nature itself. I do much of my work from nature, "before the subject," as it is commonly called. But what is of great importance to me is observation of the movement of colors. Only in this way have I found the laws of complementary and simultaneous contrasts of colors which sustain the very rhythm of my vision. In this movement of colors I find the essence, which does not arise from a system, or an a priori theory." http://www.artchive.com/artchive/D/delaunay.html