Experi-paintings

Broadway Boogie Woogie - Mondrian

Inspired by the paintings of Mondrian, I decided to do some experi-paintings of my own. 

Mondrian's paintings are mainly compositions of lines, shapes and colours. It is hard to see his inspirations coming from real life, though I daresay most of them are. One painting that is known to be inspired by real life is the Broadway Boogie Woogie. This painting is Mondrian's interpretation of the city grid of Manhattan and the boogie woogie music to which he liked to dance. 

I decided to take some photographs of London and try and capture the essence of those images using only lines, circles and squares. Here are some of the results.

What I liked about these experiments is that even without the reference of the image, the result is makes an interesting composition. I do feel that even devoid of the colours and drastically simplified, the compositions do capture the essence of the photograhs. The next step would be, possibly, to add some colour. Will leave that for another sunny day :-)

The Van Doesburg Formula

Something really interesting I came across while reading up on Van Doesburg. 

Remember this image by Van Doesburg that was on display at the exhibition at the Tate? It seems like nothing more than a very balanced succession of squares..... showing perspective or distance, perhaps?

But apparently, there is a formula behind these squares that make them so splendidly balanced. It's based on a 'recursive' formula. Basically, the sides of each square and the distance between them are half the size of the preceding square.

Hence - the second painting exhibited alongside the one above (I did wonder!) which shows that he actually did the math before the seemingly innocuous painting of a bunch of black squares!

Song without Words

Does one need to see an actual image of a race car to comprehend 'speed'?

Is the image of a seesaw one of the only means to convey 'balance'?

These, I feel are the fun part of exploring the fundamentals of visual grammar. Stripped of imagery and symbolism, how can an emotion or a concept be represented with help of only lines circles and squares.

The following are some of the such examples. One concept conveyed with the help of 1) lines, 2) circles and 3) squares.

Motion:

Distance:

Growth:

Faking Depth

The introduction of gray to the BW palette conjures up a feeling of depth (while totally playing tricks on your eyes!). 

My experiment was to take 1 large black square, 1 large gray square, 1 small black square and 1 small gray square and moving them around a large white square. I created a basic composition with these squares :

Left : The squares of colours used for the experiment. Right : The basic composition that was the starting point.

So now, I started moving the squares around to see what happened. To my amusement, just by moving the larger squares (and not touching the smaller ones) I was able to create a few compositions where it seemed like I had moved all 4 squares (while I had moved only 2).

I really liked the one on the extreme RHS as it gives a really good feeling of depth. Also, I think, it was the one where one is least likely to believe that the small squares from the original composition were not touched.

Visual Grammar 101, 102, 103

Christian Leborg, in his very compelling book, Visual Grammar, says that it can help you speak and write about visual objects and their creative potential, and better understand the graphics that bombard us 24/7.  

Consciously and subconsciously,  knowingly or unknowingly we are constantly influenced by the visual world that surrounds us. Every individual has created their own visual dictionary influenced by these outside elements juxtaposed with our inner personalities. A red circle can symbolize 'stop' for most, but to me, it also signifies the Indian 'bindi'. 

Basically, to understand the working of this visual language, the best method that has helped me immensely was  to do meticulous studies of lines, circles and squares till I went googly eyed! The relationship between them, the effects on variations of thickness, colour, orientation.... I can go on and on... 

Here are some examples of my studies :

Lines, circles and square of varying sizes

Adding a little bit of variation by changing thickness, size or colour changes the visual language quite drastically :

Keeping the lines, circles and squares within a grid, but playing with colour, subtraction, placement or orientation.....