HOWARD NEUFELD, artist

Toward a New "Spiritual In Art;" Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) revisited:

Wassily Kandinsky's explorations and insights into what he called "the spiritual in art" set an extremely high mark for anyone who chooses to follow what he began a little more than a century ago. He laid out a very detailed theory of abstract painting, one that is unique to all of the other abstract inventions. Kandinsky was responding to what he called "materialism," which to him, began in the 19th century when Reality shifted and was more or less limited to the "exterior," visible and tangible world of science. He saw this as directly responsible for a deterioration of the invisible, "interior" reality of the Self, the way Life feels and experiences itself; immediately and at each moment of its Being.

Today, with technology accelerating exponentially and its ever-increasing affect on our lives, our subjective humanity may be even more threatened than what Kandinsky perceived in his day; unable to adjust, to move as quickly, keeping pace. Kandinsky addressed this with a unique vision for abstract painting, one based on what he called "inner necessity" that was the "spiritual in art" he wrote about, the center of his theory of abstraction and more importantly, the content of his paintings.

Note: Wassily Kandinsky was the artist who invented non-objective abstraction around 1910. If one carefully examines his theory of abstraction, any type of visual phenomena can be perceived as having its affect revealed from an external reality, from the visible world; or the internal reality of our Being, the invisible sourse of feelings, where visual phenomena is revealed to us from within our "internal" Self. This is where Kandinsky locates what he calls "inner necessity" and what sets his theory of abstraction apart from the other forms of abstraction, all of which come from the "external" reality of the visible world.

Sometimes we have to look to the past to move forward:

If we examine the short history of abstract painting we can follow the various styles and criticism that informs our current situation. There is little to show that Kandinsky's ideas were ever clearly understood, accepted, or substantially followed through. I believe this oversight has a direct bearing on how abstraction has evolved up to its present form of "literalism." For Kandinsky, abstraction was more than a "means," it was its "content" as well.

My Response:

For now, I refer to my work as Non-objective Realism; a different kind of realism, one that isn't material - a realism of something that is Human, that we can experience and connect with inside as artist and viewer and not just another conceptual idea we see so often these days. These experiences are so rare in a world that seems to want to destroy our common humanity.

During these past few years I have been working on a smaller scale using the formats of a square and that of a mandala or cruciform shape. They also contain some areas or shapes within the Structure that physically advance, giving them a sort of bas-relief effect that work as facets. I wanted the paintings to work successfully in a closer more personal space, allowing the viewer to come face-to-face with the painting as physical form and materials that takes both thought and imagination to interact with. Not as something definitive, not a teaching or preaching thing, but something to experience where the viewer plays as important a role as the painting itself. In this setting, perhaps the observer-viewer can have what Kandinsky called an "internal" experience; the "inner necessity" that is personal, unique and subjective.

My "Inner Necessity":

When I am painting, especially what I call Chaos, I'm like a child - I see and respond with my imagination, living a sensual experience. I see and respond in what's called "the here and now," using my hands, holding a brush to apply the paint, and responding intuitively at the same time. This is why I choose to use a Process that will separate me from my ego - being as un-intentional as I can be. The Chaos I paint has to be prepared for; it requires a different state of mind than even what goes into the making of the Structure. It's not something I can just walk up to the painting and do. I have to really work at it, prepare myself in order to carry out this Process. When I do, I'm in the present as things happen on the painting, not before. The pounding of the brush on the Structure has a rhythm - not one that is constant and even but one that changes by sometimes responding to different illusions beginning to form as these individual dabs of paint begin to accumulate and move within and across the Structure, sometimes relating to it and sometimes not. My sense of this is one of amazement, one of realization, of watching illusions being formed as if by magic; creating via being receptive. After I finish an area or shape, I look into what has just taken place and how it operates with the other parts of the painting. I try to feel with my eyes, experiencing the painting as a single thing, a universe of sorts.

These sensual or sensational experiences seem to be something I've always had since a very young child; they continue to this day. The catalyst has always been what I call visual phenomena or visual effects found in my surroundings that now I find in my  paint. They trigger my imagination. To me they are spiritual in nature, i.e., not just visual experiences that one can describe with any completeness.

I also continue to experience what Kandinsky called "stimmung," the atmosphere, when improvising with Phi and non-Euclidean geometry as a kind of Structure that exists beyond geometry; that is made manifest through the combination of geometric structure and what I call Chaos by means of a Process. With Structure, or the process of creating the Structure, it is not limited intellectual consideration using geometry, but includes something internal, so deeply so, it's is not "figured out" - it seems to just come together by itself. I don't question or second-guess it.

Note: Kandinsky is like a mentor to me not only as the inventor of non-objective abstraction, but especially in my search for a new "spiritual in art." In his time, Paris was the epicenter of Modern art and he spent his last 11 years there, largely ignored and essentially abandoned by his former artists' community, even though a few artist friends did invite him to show some of his paintings whenever they had an exhibition in one of the Paris galleries. When I look at Kandinsky's paintings, I approach them as if encountering a contemporary work, in fact, when I think back to the "event" of my becoming a painter, that is, my "conversion experience" as I call it, I encountered paintings by VanGogh in a similar way.