Have you heard of Wassily Kandinsky, a master painter that could write about art? Artists get busy painting about painting, leaving everyone but a few artists in the dust. So who can clearly communicate a true painterly understanding of abstraction? The answer is: the artists! But artists are too busy painting to bother with writing, right? This is why Kandinsky is special. We know much more about Kandinsky because he put his ideas down on paper, in paint, and in words. Kandinsky tells us that his paintings embody spiritual language.
How was he so successful? Think of an artist’s biography as a “How-to” guide. Abstract artists need all the help that they can get, to stay alive. Try living off the sales of non-objective abstract art. Not easy. You might get a thousand smirks before you make a sale. Kandinsky’s writing created a market for his paintings–and mine too.
A common response to abstraction is fear. People are afraid of art that they can’t understand. They fear art galleries too. That’s terrible! One of the most powerful aspects of abstraction: I can show what I believe, in a new, nonverbal way. Your eyes are surprised, like Adam when he saw Eve. His eyes were open. But most of us get distracted. We miss the message. So, reading helps. Reading about abstraction helps remove this fear. I seek to make more easily digestible information on abstraction available. This is why I write.
With the Internet, the pace of pictural communication accelerates. Critics and collectors lose their grip. Even street art runs rampant online. So who’s the authority now? From Bauhaus to Hoffman’s schoolhouse to the Black Mountain College. From Paris to New York to the Internet. As gallery storefronts close. As collectors depend more on the Internet. Now, the authority is online: KnowingArt.com