Kandinsky: Movement to and from the Center

"...these leaps—from the giraffe to the toad, from the human being to the fish, from the elephant to the mouse—are nothing more than variations on one theme, and that the most infinite possibilities are drawn entirely out of the one  principle of concentric structure."
pg 107, Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane

Whiteness

"Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation , when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as an essence is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? . . . Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like willful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored or coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino Whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"

Moby Dick, pg. 196

Gustave Morea

"But I now leave my Cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing everything."

Moby Dick
pg.149

Apotheosis

divinity is the attempt to escape our biological enslavement

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

 

  Intensity building toward a central climax.

"I've always worked under the notion that the world around me is unknowable . . . and through the gradual distribution of marks and modulation of color . . . and process - scraping and dragging - I can distill something concrete from something transient."

-Brian Rutenberg


Some reflection on Rutenberg's videos, centered compositions, and frames:

Ripples billowing inward (as alternating levels of intensity - empty and full, empty and full...) from outside in the surrounding space to the center of an ordered frame of reference. The same ripples are simultaneously billowing outward. Rhythms are frozen in a painting, therefore this paradox can occur. The viewer is being pulled through, into the deep. In the deep you are further away from yourself and closer toward the center of everything. The painting lets you inside and lets you out, billowing in one frozen moment over the course of many.