Terrace

Apparently today is a public holiday.  There are definite signs of people reacting to the shambles of the weekend by choosing no longer to bother with social distancing.

Today's first listen was to an album by a group of five women singers - Daphne's Flight - and their album from 2017 Knows Time, Knows Change. My favourite song is an unexpectedly apt song - Split - which is very cleverly written and should be listened to right until the end.

The notion of abstract art developed out of Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism in the early 20th century. Abstract artists sought to create art which was not limited by the need to represent specific scenes, objects or people. Music guided them, with an awareness that music can sweep a listener into other worlds without needing to represent nature directly, by imitating crowing cocks or chuckling babies. Yet concert goers readily imagined the countryside or childhood memories. If music could be abstract and create beautiful images, why could not art do the same?

One of the first pioneers of abstract art was Wassily Kandinsky, born in Russia in 1866, he painted many of his greatest works in Germany.  Like many other abstract painters, he started his career painting representational images of landscapes and towns but progressed to increasingly abstract forms. 

His greatest series of works was a set of ten Compositions, of which Composition VIII, painted in 1923 whilst he was a Professor at the Weimar Bauhaus is a dramatic example.  It features a number of circles, a form he though "pointed most clearly to the fourth dimension."