Art: The Man Who Heard His Paintbox Hiss

Ossian Ward describes the affects of Wassily Kandinsky's synaesthesia:

Kandinsky achieved pure abstraction by replacing the castles and hilltop towers of his early landscapes with stabs of paint or, as he saw them, musical notes and chords that would visually 'sing' together. In this way, his swirling compositions were painted with polyphonic swathes of warm, high-pitched yellow that he might balance with a patch of cold, sonorous blue or a silent, black void. Rainbird describes how the artist used musical vocabulary 'to break down the external walls of his own art'.

[via Design Observer: Observed]

Category: Art