Jamie Banks

Kandinsky the painter believed that the aim of art was to transmit the artist’s uniqueness and inner vision, which necessitated the elevation of objective reality.

The houses and churches were painted with such glittering colors that he thought he was inside a picture when he entered them.

When we interrupt the instinctual simplifying, organizing, and categorizing processes of our brain, we create a mental space for added layers of complexity and meaning. Our thoughts become more nuanced and textured. Our senses are awakened and engaged.

“The keyboard is color, the eyes are hammers, and the heart is a piano with several strings. The musician is the hand that plays, feeling one note or another in order to create vibrations in one’s soul.”

He would subsequently reflect on this encounter: “The brochure advised me that it was a haystack. I had no idea what that was. This non-recognition was excruciatingly distressing for me. The painter, in my opinion, had no right to depict incoherently. I had a distinct impression that the painting’s subject was absent. And I was surprised and perpl

Kandinsky’s paintings from this time are huge, emotive colored masses that are judged independently of shapes and lines; these no longer serve to delimit them, but instead, overlap freely to produce paintings of tremendous energy.

Learning how to think with images begins with learning how to see, or perhaps more accurately, learning how to un-see .