Love these colors

This is another painting that I always enjoy seeing when I'm at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (you can click on it for a bigger view):

The painting is "Fish Magic" by my favorite abstract Expressionist, Paul Klee.  One thing that I like about Klee is that in spite of his knack for constant visual innovation, I almost always manage to recognize a painting as being done by him.  To me this is something that makes abstract art so worthy of our admiration... the development of a style and a language through which an artist communicates.  It's irresponsible to dismiss abstract art as being unskilled, as the art highlights capacities that are uniquely human... The ability to appreciate not just physical aspects of color, form, line, and texture, but also playfulness, humor, tragedy, and a limitless number of other moods and intangibles.  Indeed, it is partly these ethereal qualities of humanity which have had some theoretical physicists declaring that science cannot explain everything (the limit of science being that everything we "know" is based on some other assumption being accepted as true) and even the Grand Unified Theory, if it's ever found, won't explain what love and hate are.  (Or maybe the reason that we can't find this Theory of Everything is because western science has spent decades dismissing life as a meaningless accident in the universe, thus downplaying a significant part of what we know is reality, that being our thoughts and emotions).  Anyway, let us not demand merely representational art (a common issue in today's digital art realm).  We can demonstrate concepts beyond just technical competency.  Abstract art reminds us of why we are different from inanimate objects and even intelligent animals.  Color and line are amazing things in themselves, and we can appreciate them easily.


Klee was a master of working with different painting media.  He often made considerable effort prepping a ground for his canvas, and in his "Fish Magic" painting, he actually cut out a rectangular piece of fabric and pasted it onto the main canvas (easily visible).  In a book titled "Klee", Douglas Hall / Richard Verdi described the extra piece of canvas as a window of time, splitting the head of the red figure at the bottom of the painting.  The little fellow is somber, looking inside the box, where the manmade clock is, but the face is happy which looks to the outside, where nature runs amok.  I suppose that this suggests well the benefit of freeing ourselves from the self-inflicted, limited perceptions and attitudes, the desire to explain everything with logic and reason!