by Walter Orioli

Recently it’s happened to me to read again Concerning the Spiritual in Art by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Wrote in 1910 and published in 1911. A prophetic book that has inspired art and artist of a whole century. A document full of a non-religious mysticism and art philosophy, but on the other side a theoretic-practical work that is highly topical for all the art-therapists.

The main idea of this pioneering book is the strong connection between harmony in art and harmony in the whole cosmos considering that often artist’s soul is in relation with world’s one. In this way the artist shows the world essence.

We can unconsciously perceive these connections if we move closer to nature in a interior way – says Kandinsky – We can not just look the nature from outside, we shall live it from the inside.

An inner necessity that we can feel in the practice of every tipe of art, including theatre and music. The artist has to develop, in every day actions, an intentional perception stronger than the spontaneous one. He has to be synchronized with his subconscious. He has to live the perception of the world from the inside and lonely through images that come from collective and universal symbols.

With this preliminary remark, art is put as a question of contents more than a question of form.

Not how, but what is the expression, what is the spiritual look of reality? These are the questions that art, in which spiritual and inner are overlapped, still asks us.

In any case Kandinsky says also that form plays a very important role in art, he outlines the principle of inner necessity that knows how to speak to our soul and to reach the essence of things.

The message is really clear, it concerns the capacity to communicate with the inside. The abstract or figurative form of art represents the artist individual necessity and it is perfect to show his divinity.

Art is the being language (Heidegger) at divine’s service (Kandinsky).

Only through arts practice we can completely understand this concept because we all know how practice is richer than theory.

It so happened that, while i’m reading Concerning the Spiritual in Art, i met a painter – Laura Costa – as esoteric as Kandinsky.

She is an artist that refuses to exhibit her works in art galleries or to enter art market in order to express radically the principle art for art.

In her metaphysical paintings, as shown here below, we can clearly notice how the color is feeling personified and the form is artist’s inner necessity singling out.

picture 1 – Laura Costa – Poppy’s field

In Poppy’s field we can notice, at first glance, the landscape essence and its colours like sea movements or maibe a big red towel moved by the wind. All that represents spectators feelings. In this poppy’s sea it comes out nature lightness and fragility as a nourishing mother.

Hot red – said Rudolf Steiner, Kandinsky’s and Laura Costa’s inspirer – represents present radiance, the light that comes out from nature, the vertical dimention of life that meets green, living image, synthesis between lightness and darkness, high and low, cold and hot. In this way, the colour and form combination of this painting communicates balance and harmony.

picture 2 – Laura Costa – Wave

Laura Costa doesn’t paint when she feels blue, she paints only when she can communicate positive feelings. She usually follows a zen tecnique in order to get ready to painting action. It consists in keep her head blank and in let her hand make a gesture. Intuition will choose the primary colour. This inclination to make a clean sweep of preconceived ideas about forms and colours is fundamental in order to begin a composition – says Laura Costa -  for example to realize Wave I made a sketch with pastels first and then I defined its shape by putting it on canvas with oil paints. In this way I stand by the original shape and colours that came out from my soul.

The whole art search of the last two centuries aims at set the painture free from the duty to build a subject. Landscape or portrait, dead or living nature, artists are inclined to let the pure colour give free rhythm to the form.

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) too, although his interior caos, expresses in his canvas a great brightness in a brilliant explosion of brushstrokes and surfaces that he can put in order in the coloured structures of his pantings. This is an example of how art expresses the artist madness and often art surpasses his madness with an explosion of colours and forms that find in the composition their rigour, a clear shape, an universal value.

The principle of inner necessity, that recalls Kandinsky, can be translated with the interior need to express the soul of things, this necessity causes the birth of the shape.

In this case necessities agree with expressive effects and so, dear Laura Costa, we can paint even when we are feeling blue. When there is a being pain, the colour, its musicality, the strenghtness of primary colours educates the artist soul, his sensitivity, to an inner and spiritual uniqueness free from any prejudice. I think of yellow: spirit brightness for Steiner, representation of hysteria for psychologists but also typical colour of  lands that hold us with our feet firmly on the ground. Feeling the abstract immediate effect, as Kandinsky said.

If the artist, first spectator of his own work, can feel this abstract immediate effect and if he can read the compositive structure on spiritual basis, then he will find out that there is a certain overcoming pain in his work because it goes directly to the origin of being. It doesn’t stop to the surface.

The artist pays attention on colours, these lively tubes that give us such a pleasure, and on their composition.

Kandinsky doesn’t build up a theory about leaving he builds up a contact with reality, even with the reality of our depression, our neurosis, our psychosis as manifestation of interior truth.

Jung already has tought us to take care of our neurosis and depression, they are a precious warning signal that told us that we have to change something in our life, we have to go towards spirit depht, the interior necessities.

Walter Orioli, psychologist, painter, theatretherapist.

www.walterorioli.it

bibliography:

Kandinsky W. Concerning the Spiritual in Art, SE, 2005