Wasilly Kandinsky on Colours

“As a thirteen or fourteen-year-old boy, I gradually saved up enough money to buy myself a paintbox containing oil paints. I can still feel today the sensation I experienced then — or, to put it better, the experience I underwent then –of the paints emerging from the tube.. One squeeze of the fingers, and out came these strange beings, one after the other, which one calls colors – exultant, solemn, brooding, dreamy, self-absorbed, deeply serious, with roguish exuberance, with a sigh of release, with a deep sound of mourning, with defiant power and resistance, with submissive suppleness and devotion, with obstinate self-control, with sensitive, precarious balance. Living an independent life of their own, with all the necessary qualities for further, autonomous existence, prepared to make way readily, in an instant, for new combinations, to mingle with one another and create an infinite succession of new worlds. Many lie there, already exhausted, weakened, petrified — spent forces, a living reminder of bygone possibilities, rejected by destiny. Fresh colors emerge from the tube, like in a battle, young forces replaceing old. In the middle of the palette exists a strange world, mad up of the remains of the colors already used, which now far from their source, promenade across canvases in necessary incarnations. Here is a world partly formed by the will to create pictures long since painted, partly generated and determined by chance, by the mysterious play of forces foreign to the artist. And I for my part owe much to chance: it has taught me more than any teacher or master. I spent not infrequent hours studying its effects with love and admiration. Praise be to the palette for the delights it offers; formed from the elements defined above, it is itself a “work,” more beautiful indeed than many a work. It sometimes seemed to me as if the brush, as it tore pieces with inexorable will from this living being that is color, conjured up in the process a musical sound. Sometimes I could hear the hiss of the colors as they mingled. It was an experience such as one might hear in the mysterious kitchens of the arcane alchemists.

“How often this first paintbox maliciously jeered and laughed at me. Sometimes the paint would trickle off the canvas, sometimes, within a short space of time, it would reveal cracks, sometimes it would turn paler, sometimes darker, sometimes it would appear to jump off the canvas and swim in mid-air; sometimes it would go dull and increasingly murky, resembling a dead bird as it starts to decompose — I don’t know how it all happened.”

“Reminiscences/Three Pictures” The Complete Writings of Wassily Kandinsky By Wassily Kandinsky, Kenneth C. Lindsay, Peter Vergo; Da Capo Press (March 21, 1994)