Day Twenty-Two – Brain Freeze

It's been three weeks since I started this daily commitment and the first day I experienced a complete creative mental block. I finally put my distracting phone and it's social media minions in time-out while picking up a craft magazine I'd already read. Then looking for something better to read and giving up on being creative for the day, fate had me pick up "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" by Wassily Kandinsky I had purchased at LACMA last year. Pretty cerebral stuff and too many concepts to discuss in this lowly blog post. But I tried to look for some helpful information for lifting my "petrified barriers" today. I ended up also turning to his essay, "On the problem of form."

Free Curve to the Point -
Accompanying Sound of Geometric Curves
Ink on paper - 1925, Wassily Kandinsky
image from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Here's a few principles.
Kandinsky likes to operate in threes and triangles.

It is every artist's responsibility to:
1. Express his inner need and talent to create art
2. Help create a spiritual atmosphere through thoughts, feelings and actions
3. Shape and modify the spiritual atmosphere for the improvement of humanity.

What blocks the "good fertilizing white ray of creativity by the evil black death-bringing hand" of destruction:
1. Fear of the clear path (evolution of art)
2. Fear of freedom (allowance of new ideas)
3. Deafness to the spirit (haters, negative thoughts)

The barriers must be removed to allow the creative urges from the internal Abstract Spirit (content) to transform the external material (form). "The most important thing in the question of form is whether or not the form has grown out of the inner necessity." I guess I wasn't feeling the Spirit today. But my headache and stiff neck/shoulder is feeling better! Thank you Kandinsky.