Galleries I have liked: Kunst Haus Wien

I have a notebook I carry around to write in when I visit galleries. I'm now writing up what I have written in it, from years gone past.

I've always liked visual art.
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April 2014, trip to Vienna on the back of the European Geosciences Conference.

At 19, 20 years old, Hundertwasser's watercolours are gauche and colourful. I like his repetition of red and green. And the way the paintings use repetitive, consistent shades in the same piece. There is no smudging, no blending or blurring. He draws on lines of colour like a primary school child inking in a fantastically naive colouring of the world.

A spiral whose lines don't necessarily get larger as they increase outwards.

Born 1928, Vienna Dies 2000.

"I close my eyes halfway just as when I conceive my paintings and I see the houses dunkelbunt instead of ugly cream colour and green meadows on all roofs instead of concrete. I am looking forward to become humus myself buried naked without coffin under a tree in my land in Au Tea Roa.

THE LINE I TRACE WITH MY FEET WALKING TOWARDS THE MUSEUM IS MORE IMPORTANT AND MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN THE LINES I FIND THERE HUNG ON THE WALLS [PARIS 1953]

OUR REAL ILLITERACY IS OUR INABILITY TO CREATE

TO PAINT IS A RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

[HUNDERTWASSER'S WORDS]

1953 - Paints his first spiral.
1954 - Develops theory 'transautomatism' and begins to number his works.
1972 - Publishes manifesto 'Your Window Right - Your Tree Duty'
1973 - First portoflio with Japanese woodcuts. Is first European painter to have his works cut by Japanese masters.
1993 - Humane redesign of the Cancer Ward at the University Clinic in Graz, Austria.
1986 - The Hundertwasser House presented to tenants.

Voyeurs de Jardin - 1982

And again, what is this trick of perspective that reminds me of MC Escher, gives me an idea for a contorted landscape? And in copying the painting I am taken back to the school days, and I remember anew the point of copying paintings / artworks like they used to make us do, because only in copying do you pay attention and see a little as the painter saw. I fall downwards along his lines and I see the faces within the painting the buildings that morph into alive voyeuristic faces of lips and eyes packed close to the streaming green field and blue streams. In taking the time to freeze in place and draw I feel closer to understanding him, more than the museum could give. Something that seems akin to his comment about feet, lines, walking to the museum. The act is more important and meaningful than the art.

My drawing is imperfect, the lines ought to be thicker. There are no line-lines, only straggles of ribbons. Cutting through the watercolour mud-green comes a blue of ultramarine, a tropical shade of a child's idealism. If you want to think of it that way.

I feel I am looking downwards on it as well as looking through it. That trumpet-end resembles a symapse. The squares could be vesciles. And it could be likened to those plant cell diagrams, the blobby enfolding nature of biological growth.

The lines have disjunctions, very deliberate ones. It's like he was painting then stopped and knocked his vision slightly aside and then carried on.

Lines of radiating squares, disjunctions, and golgi-body-like blobs give a perspective framework to the painting.

It's like looking down on a spiral staircase, with the horizon and the sea and the land behind it.

Or a heart... two great bonds of muscle lead away on the bottom left and bottom right.

And if looking at this later... remember that Hundertwasser never flicked a line. He always drew them very heavily and deliberately, very straggled.

The Hundertwasser collection has me wondering anew about doing homages to the right artists for the right bits of science...