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... real artist as far as he creates art for the sake of creating art: he never draws sketches or preparatory drawings, he always acts when he feels that this or that is right to do in a particular moment, when he really feels that he cant keep his feelings inside any longer he starts painting, writing essay, or expressing himself in his exhibitions. For it is only the pure idea that has meaning. Everything else has everything else. Everybody's soul is an individual thing it has its own vision and its impossible to give it orders or try to rule it. Human soul is an independent structure inside, without which people are mere creatures unable to think, analyze and feel.
Barnett Newman's soul found its expression in the pictures of its owner. These pictures saw the world as strange things of strange shape and size and with strange geometric figures on them. Let it be. Let it be anything.
Let it be blank canvas if it really serves as a mirror to the painters soul. It is reasonable to sum up Barnett Newman's creative activity with his own words: The fact is that I was in opposition to the Surrealists. No question that the Surrealists made a great contribution by showing that it was possible to paint a subjective thought, a feeling, a subjective idea. No question that the Surrealists freed painting from its old subject matter of nature, of still life, the figure and formal abstraction.
It is a debt that I willingly admit. But I found their dogmas, their subject-matter based on Freud and Marx, their techniques, and their failure to get away from the anecdote, to be without interest to me. My paintings are, in fact, a confrontation with Surrealism. Just as they are a confrontation with abstraction. One of Barnett Newman's closest friends was Mark Rothko, whose creative activity and name are often mentioned together with his friends. In his paintings Mark Rothko tried to reach freedom.
This was mostly by means of paying very little attention to shape, line and perspective. This means that the object of his attention is not the form, but the contents. When people see a book, they first of all pay attention to its cover, but irrespectively of the beauty of a books color they decide whether they like it or not only judging from its contents and from the fact whether it appeals to them or not. Its the same about people: first impression is formed judging from clothes, while the final opinion about this or that person can be formed only through a long process of communication. Its necessary to know a persons soul to understand who he or she is indeed.
A bottle would even serve a better example. One would never drink from it without knowing what is inside: tea, alcohol or poison. Otherwise they would be similar to Alice in Wonderland, who drank from bottles, the notes on which said Drink me! and ate cakes with the notes Eat me. We all know that such deeds never lead to good consequences. This domination of content over form is the main idea of Mark Rothko's paintings.
Rothko's spirituality is very specific and sometimes difficult to understand. However, he wants the deepest parts of his soul to be open to a wide range of art lovers and ordinary people. He himself described his purpose as the simple expression of the complex thought. Thoughts and feelings were boiling up inside him and he was willing to share all these emotions with everybody. But its impossible to share with everybody if everybody can not understand you. Thats why in this case the painters aim was to make his art understandable to people, which would be his highest reward.
Critiques consider Mark Rothko to be a colorist. The painter himself rejects this statement, but irrespectively of the fact whether it is true or not, color plays a great part in his paintings. This conclusion can be made judging from the names of his paintings. In his Black on Deep Purple of 1964 an impenetrable black central section is surrounded by a dark purple ground area of thin paint textured surface. His earlier work White, Red on Yellow of 1958, he considered to be too noisy and approximate. Here the question of the importance of color in the paintings arises again.
The colors a painter uses show his mood at the moment or period of painting and are undoubtedly a reflection of his personality. Colors are an integral part of art spirituality. This aspect as well as geometric figures has something in common with psychoanalysis. It reminds of the Lusher psychological test. The main idea of this test is choosing the color you prefer out of the proposed ones. The results of the test come out written out on a paper (or screen) of a certain color.
This color is the color of ones mood, consciousness or personality at the moment of passing this test. For example, if ones color is orange or green, they are most likely to be a lively and cheerful person, if it is grey he or she is a boring person, unsatisfied with their life and surrounding, if it is blue they are a dreamer and so on. Even if Mark Rothko is not a colorist, he still looked at his palette every time he started working and every single time he had to choose one or several of the colors he had there and every single time the colors he chose were speaking for his soul. He used a large variety of colors from bright happy colors to dark murky colors to convey his emotions and a sense of spirituality. A picture of Mark Rothko's life can be drawn by examining his paintings from the earliest to the latest ones.
His periods of happiness and despair, good and bad moments can be traced by means of that. There is one more fact about Rothko's paintings that is of great interest the division of the canvas into two parts. At that time Rothko was most likely thinking about the two sides of the personality. Peoples characters a dual they have a good and a bad side. Everything people do is the responsibility of one of their sides. If people break the law it is because their bad side dominated over the good one, if they save a persons life they are surely guided by the best side of their personality.
There undeniably is a line between these sides, some kind of a neutral zone, crossing which on this or that side matters a lot. This division is quite natural everything in nature has a couple. Even human body can be an example: people have two ears, two eyes, two nostrils, two hands, two legs. As for the human heart, which is single, it is single only for a certain period of time until it finds its second part, which the person one loves possesses. All in all, Mark Rothko is a spiritual artist, who had his own original way of expressing himself.
He gives people a possibility to realize that the world consists of colors and everybody sees it in different colors. Mark Rothko proposed his concept of the universe in colors, he showed his understanding of his environment and suggested that people form their own. Mark Rothko's as well as Barnett Newman's images are rather dark and this fact relates them to mysticism. Their canvases are usually borderless, symbolizing deep silence and void to convey the spirit of mystery. Kazimir Malevitch is one more vivid example of spirituality in art. His most famous picture Black Square gained world popularity.
In this painting the spirit of the author came out in the form of an ideal black square. The color is the deepest ever. Black color means darkness. When entering a dark room one can never be sure about what is inside. He or she just opens the door and waits for what will happen further. Black Square is a good example for spirituality in art because it symbolizes a soul.
Human soul is very similar to a black square. When one gets acquainted with a person (opens the door into the dark room), they know almost nothing about him or her except the way they are dressed and their appearance (only knows that the room has a door), in a while, in the process of communication one gets to know the person better, discovers that he or she is kind, helping, superstitious, reserved or boring (one gets to know that the room they entered has the form of a square, two windows and a table), having know this person for a long time, one realizes that they are in love, that they got on like a house on fire, they are indifferent to each other or that they should stop communicating with him or her (one sees the whole room and decides whether they feel like home, are down in the dumps or just feel like its high time to leave). Human soul is a very dark place and one can never know what is inside unless you really want it. There are many versions about what the black square Malevitch's picture means. This fact reflects the real symbolism and spirituality difficulties in understanding the picture reflect difficulty in understanding the soul.
Kazimir Malevitch portrayed his own soul in this picture, meaning that very few people can understand him and that his own soul is a dark room for the majority of people. Some critiques consider the black square to be a personification of dark and evil spirits, some keep firm to the idea that it symbolizes the authors stamina and strength. The sense of all of Malevitch's works was in feeling, which appeared as the determining factor in his creative activity, and this is the reason for us to consider him a painter, who put all his heart and soul into his work, whose canvases can not live without his soul and whose soul can not live without his canvases. Kazimir Malevitch was a Suprermatist. It means that he considered the environment and the surrounding meaningless; but what he really worshipped was feeling. Malevitch's spirituality was a great step forward in the Russian culture he showed the way to artists and art lovers, who discovered a new world, which was unknown to them before.
By opening his soul through his pictures he opened the souls of many people. He managed to convey, to give his soul to people and that is the main sense of his spirituality. Generally, spiritualism in art is an essential thing. There is no art without spirituality. If a picture has no soul, it is not a picture.
When real artists create their works its like a confession what they do and what they feel becomes open to the publics opinion. Everyone in the public starts understanding his own inner world better when trying to understand the inside of the painter. Thats why spirituality is essential not only for a circle of people called artists, but for the entire humanity. Anything becomes an art when one is dedicated fully to this or that occupation. Even peoples professions are an art. When one feels that their job is their cup of coffee, it can naturally be referred to as an art because what he or she does is unique and no one but he or she can do this.
Creating art is a real pleasure. It brings relaxation and satisfaction. Partly, because a person is engaged in what they want to be engaged, partly because they understand that they make many people happy by means of their art, partly just because they are artists. Adelaide Hasse once said: Never forget that it is the spirit with which you endow your work that makes it useful or futile. This quotation should be a rule for those, who decide to create something for the sake of receiving money.
Art is a spiritual matter. Human soul emanates light and emotion and they settle on the canvas. Creating a piece of art is unique because it gives a possibility to watch an unprecedented process - the birth of a new life, a new emotion, a new feeling, a new soul. Every man who steeps himself in the spiritual possibilities of his heart is a valuable helper in the building of the spiritual pyramid which will someday reach to heaven. Only spiritually rich people can achieve the highest peak in their art. Salvador Dali, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Kazimir Malevitch showed real spirituality in art.
Their art has nothing in common with false and lies they painted their feelings and deserve recognition for that, they never acted like fantoccini in the theatre of life. They themselves ruled their life. They were their own masters. All four of them were geniuses because they took art as it is a pure thing, which should never be simulated or mixed with money. They realized that it should exist independently from everything else and they did their best to achieve this goal. Bibliography Ades, Dawn.
Dali and Surrealism. New York: Harper & Row Publishers Icon Editions, 1982. Dali, Salvador Diary of a Genius. Creation Books, 1998 Dali, Salvador The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. Dover Publication, 1993 Gibson, Ian The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali. W.
W. Norton & Company, 1998. Kandinsky, Wassily Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Dover Publications, 1977.
Mainland, R. and C. Lake. A Dictionary of Modern Painting New York: Tudor Pub, 1956. Next, Giles Malevitch.
Taschen, 2003. Rosenblum, Robert Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966.
Rosenblum, Robert Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975. See, Peter Mark Rothko. New York: Doubleday, 1961. Tuchman, Physics Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas. Yale University Press, 1998.
The Painters Keys. Community of Artists, Art Quotations, Copyright 2005 Robert Get web (accessed on April 16, 2005) Causey, Andrew Rothko through his paintings Studio International 183, no. 943 (1972) web (accessed April 16, 2005) Reise, Barbara The stance of Barnett Newman Studio International 179, no. 919 (1970) web (accessed on April 16, 2005) Newman, Barnett Chartres and Jericho Studio International 179, no. 919 (1970) web (accessed on April 16, 2005)
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Research essay sample on Salvador Dali Modern Painting
