Several Circles, Oil on Canvas

I had a dream about Kandinsky the other night. It was a warm dream of a stuffy classroom, with Kandinsky standing before me and a group of dream colleagues lecturing on and on about the spiritual nature of color, a line, form, and such and such inner necessities.

I think at some point in my life all the talk of spirituality in painting would have thrilled me more than it does today. But that has more to do with words like ‘spirituality’ than it does Kandinsky’s work. I still feel a stir when I look into his paintings. But I have never liked the idea of attempting to pin rules to such things as colors. It’s like cataloging cadavers, ignoring personalities and relationships.

The fact that so many of them are musical in their approach and execution has always seemed obvious to me. That sense of color as tone, line as lyric – I feel it has always been so present. And I think that is a fairly remarkable accomplishment for any painter.