Cat and Bird
Klee was started out on the path to be a musician and began playing the violin at eight. At that time he was also given a box of chalk by his grandmother and encouraged to draw. I think there is something musical about his compositions, maybe because of this. Especially I can see the influence of the string instruments in his work.
Captive
Klee worked with many different types of media—oil paint, watercolor, ink, and more. He often combined them into one work becoming the father of mixed media. The above painting is done on fabric pasted to a board. He has been associated with expressionism, cubism and surrealism, but does not fit into one school of art.
His works, like the Cat and Bird one, often have a fragile child-like quality to them and are usually on a small scale. They frequently allude to poetry, music and dreams and can include words or musical notation. His later works, which are my personal favorites, are distinguished by spidery hieroglyph-like symbols which he famously described as "taking a line for a walk".
As illustrated in this work entitled Contemplating.
Or this work called The Twittering Machine.
Yellow Birds and is my favorite.
For more information on Paul Klee see Wiki.
I like Yellow Birds as well.
ReplyDeleteIsn't it interesting how often art and music interconnect?
For myself I can create music but can only appreciate art. The closest I achieve is through photography.
I think photography can be art. And digital manipulation of the image is no different than the darkroom manipulation of the photographic pioneers. Just s much more you can do.
ReplyDeleteI think art is about an inner ear or eye or voice. If you develop that everything else is just learned skills.
I wish I could play music. other than CD's
I like Klee very much, his choice of colours and the short poems and musical pieces he created with images. Art Sunday can work in different sites, we just follow the crumbs trail, I agree Blogger feels like home. I feel well at WP too and Multiply, because I have so many friends there. What I'm growing unused to is Y360, it's fast becoming a strange land.
ReplyDeleteI love the picture entitled Contemplating.
ReplyDeleteI'm finding the more I contemplate it the more I see.
I agree wholeheartedly with your comments about learned skills. Some of the great artists studios were full of people with learned skills, jim the trees, fred the horses etc. but it was their master with the artistic talent who directed them.
One of the paintings (print) which hung in our house as I was growing up was Paul Klee's Head of a Man. I loved it. As we moved the picture moved with us, always finding it's dominant place on a living room wall as if it were our guardian.
ReplyDeleteWhen I moved out on my own I took the picture with me. Hauled that thing around for twenty years, again always hanging it on my own living room wall where ever I lived. Lots of people asked why I had the thing but I just answered that I thought it was great.
A few years ago I quit my job as a graphic designer, had a huge yard sale & sold nearly every thing I owned. I moved "back home" to paint full time. Sadly, the picture went in the yard sale and I've missed it a lot. Reading this post nearly brought tears to my eyes thinking about that tattered old print. Guess I'll just have to replace it.
There are just some works of art that get to your soul. I have a couple that I think, were I an Egyptian Pharoah, I would have put in my tomb. And then there are those that you view at a gallery(could never afford to own) but the seeing of them never quite leaves your memory.
ReplyDeleteAnd as an artist I have those creations I do not want to sell but convince myself if the price is right I will and then later regret. I personally have never found the Klee print my room mate had. But I can remember it almost stroke for stroke.
BTW I found several good Klee sites on Google that sold prints and posters of his works.