Paul Klee

Pages from Paul Klee’s notes. Images via Zentrum Paul Klee.

"How To Be An Artist, According to Paul Klee," is such a simple, beautifully insightful essay by Sarah Gottesman for Artsy. I had always loved Klee's works whenever I saw them, and I knew some sketchy details about his work at the Bauhaus. But this little article makes me wish terribly that I had gotten the chance to know him. 

For example, he took a color wheel and made it into a color sphere, with white at the top and black at the bottom of the sphere, to model all elements of color, including saturation, hue and value. He also thinks that color pairings worked like music and could make harmonious or inharmonious sounds. I totally thought this once when I saw a room full of Rothkos and they seemed like they were humming at me. Plus, Klee also played the violin. 

So many mind blowing things in this essay. Like how the father of abstraction could have been so devoted to natural branching systems like trees and plants or the circulatory system. Or that the first line of his Pedagogical Sketchbook was: "An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal." 

Left: Paul Klee’s color chart, from his notes. Image via Zentrum Paul Klee; Right: Goethe’s color wheel, published in Theory of Colours. Image via Wikimedia Commons.