What I call “pure painting” is a concept that has prevailed in American aesthetics since at least the 1940s. Most prominent among its practitioners are the Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell. Their work, in all its high-intensity variety, displays the purity of modern painting: its exclusive reliance on the elements of form, line, and color.
What at first may seem to be a reduction in painting – no longer depicting natural or familiar objects, and thereby restricting the viewer’s visual field – is in fact an expansion. Abstract or nonobjective painting is about something more than merely representing the world of the senses on canvas or paper. It has become self-conscious, making itself the focus of its “representation.” By that, I mean that the Abstract Expressionists shaped this new, elemental style of painting into a tour de force of innovation, passion, and extraordinary use of color.
Norman Carr, an award-winning nonobjective painter from Wichita, Kansas, is an expert in each of these fields; indeed, his abstract oeuvre has lifted them to an almost transcendent level. Much more could be said about his hard-edged geometric forms or the precision of his lines. But I am interested in the emotional impact of his colors, in which he follows the lead of his ghostly mentor, the late Wassily Kandinsky.
I hit upon the controlling idea of this essay after admiring one of Carr’s recent paintings, Shape Symposium No. 5 (2022), which graces the front cover of my fourth full-length book of poems, In Search of the Sublime (Meadowlark Poetry Press, 2023). At first, I faced a well-worn conundrum: how to assess the ongoing impact of a nonobjective painting, after the shock of the new has worn off. The answer, it turns out, is clear and simple in Carr’s case: The emotional power of color fuels the strength of his works.Now, emotion can easily be deemed the only lasting value of all the arts, especially music. Rooted in inwardness, our experience of great music transmutes sounds into a distinct perception of time, which flows from the progression of musical notes and the composer’s signature movements. But one pioneering abstract painter discovered that music does much more. For Kandinsky, the Russian maestro of nonobjective painting in the early to mid-20th century, music also expresses colors in all their visual intensity.
Hearing Music and Seeing Colors
The most famous incident of this type of “mystical” effect of music on its listeners happened the night Kandinsky attended a concert of Wagner’s Lohengrin at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. Not only was the music forceful, as expected, but it caused Kandinsky to see the color of each note in this new work.
Biographers, art critics, and aficionados of painting continue to debate whether Kandinsky’s identification of music and colors was caused by synesthesia, a neurological condition in which one sense, in this case, hearing, stimulates another, sight. Synesthesia certainly is the most direct and obvious diagnosis of what occurred to Kandinsky that night. But for me, that “spell” is better understood as an intuition of the underlying unity of all artistic expression. Musical notes can also be colors because both elements share the same emotional foundation.
I have undertaken this lengthy diversion to make a singular point: Norman Carr’s oeuvre of nonobjective paintings displays an identical passion to Kandinsky’s synesthesia: the perception of a unifying, emotional bond that joins disparate aesthetic elements. In this framework, music and painting become one because they share the same telos: to leave a lasting emotional impression on the listener or viewer.
How does this follow? If we admit that emotion is the final value of nonobjective painting, then we must also recognize that emotion – like all perceptions – is never objective, but intrinsically subjective. The viewer must inwardly appropriate her visual experience: Whatever is seen must first be intended by the viewer, then interpreted by her.
The Primacy of Spirit Over Matter
Here is the epistemological foundation of modern painting that Kandinsky intuited, and Carr builds on: No quality of a painting exists independently or objectively. It must be affirmed subjectively, finding its place in the perceptual field of the viewer. Why? Because the immateriality of human experience requires it. This immateriality – as the philosopher George Lowell Tollefson demonstrates in his recent book The Immaterial Structure of Human Experience (Palo Flechado Press, 2019) – manifests the primacy of spirit over matter, not only in our knowledge of the world and each other, but also in our perception of truth, beauty, and goodness.
That said, let us turn to a closer analysis of Shape Symposium No. 5. We can immediately see the dominance of yellow in the top portion of this large detail of the painting. And with even greater intensity, we perceive the cluster of blue forms, varied in their hues, in the lower section. Though these “pieces” of blue are not all connected, they collectively beam brightly, creating an anchor in a sea of intriguing shapes and other, darker, more earthy colors. Once we have surveyed their range, we can immediately perceive them as one extended image whose cumulative revelation of blue stands in opposition to the yellows above. What began as formally complementary colors on the artist’s color wheel becomes antagonistic: Each swath of yellow and blue vies for dominance in the viewer’s vision.
To help decipher the emotional force of these colors, we will turn to Kandinsky’s assessment of each. His thoughts will deepen our experience of the colors and provide a continuum from Kandinsky to nonobjective painting in the 21st century, which Carr so successfully draws on.
For Kandinsky, yellow and blue are the quintessential warm and cool colors, primed to produce “spiritual vibrations” in the viewer. (All color definitions that follow are presented in an online essay by Ekaterina Smirnova titled “Basic Color Theory by Kandinsky.”)
Yellow is variously “warm, cheeky and exciting, disturbing for people,” and associated with “attack and madness.” Blue, on the other hand, is “peaceful, supernatural, deep, the typical heavenly color. The lighter it is, the more calming it is. When in the end it becomes white, it reaches absolute calmness.”
If we turn to the lower portion of Shape Symposium No. 5, we cannot miss the eccentric contours of a large container of black. We saw that for Kandinsky, yellow was ambiguous: cheeky and exciting and simultaneously reflective of madness. Black follows suit: It is “extinguished, immovable. Not without possibility . . . like an eternal silence, without future and hope. While the white expresses joy and spotless cleanliness, the black is the color of great grief.”
Color Is the Chief Element in Nonobjective Painting
Kandinsky’s emphasis here is on color as a conveyer or container of strong emotion. Not only does color set the mood of a painting, but it communes with the artist’s and viewer’s spirits to generate “the meaning” of the work. What we learn from this is that the emotion expressed by color is the chief, longest-lasting element in the aesthetic experience of the viewer.
Nevertheless, in many nonobjective paintings, the emotional impact of color is often sensed only subconsciously. We “feel” the colors’ expressing one duality after another: intensity or serenity, anger or love, action or introspection. So how does the subconscious rise to the level of the conscious? By approaching a painting, I suggest, in the way an audience experienced a classic Greek drama – particularly how spectators of tragedies viewed what happened on stage.
In his Poetics, Aristotle wrote of the catharsis that theater-goers experience while watching a tragedy: through intense feelings of pity and fear. I think much the same happens with Carr’s painting. His foundational use of color in Shape Symposium No. 5 is not tragic, per se, but it does create a tension between yellow and blue (what he calls “The Gospel of Tension”) – and is paired with the enigmatic presence of black, which threatens to swallow all in its path.
Although we may not at first articulate our experience of this painting in precisely these terms, the outlook becomes clearer – and more of a release – once Carr achieves a harmony between the agonist colors. This feeling of emotional balance, of a light, cool release from dread, turns our attention to the values in the yellows spread throughout, creating a more dominant cast to the top of the painting, and softening the conflict in the bottom half. Once this type of reconciliation is set in motion, blue moves closer to becoming an oasis of calm and retreat.
The Dialectic of Tension and Release
Even a casual observer notices how Carr’s use of color guides the viewer’s gaze and creates focal points in his nonobjective paintings. The process of layering also helps him create depth, complexity, and movement. Carr adds to this litany of effects with his individual dialectic of tension and release, issuing in a soothing harmony that draws the viewer further into the painting. What I feel as I survey the pairings of warm and cool, light and dark, depth and surface, transports me beyond the strictly visual into a realm of vitality, discovery, solitude, and hope.
And I leave my viewing of Norman Carr’s masterful painting as the audience left the Greek theater: feeling cleansed and uplifted, with a deeper understanding of the ways of gods and men. Indeed, I leave having had the purest aesthetic pleasure from an expert of the latest manifestation of pure painting.
Arlice W. Davenport is the author of four full-length books of poetry and two chapbooks. All books have been published by Meadowlark Press or Meadowlark Poetry Press in Emporia, Kansas. His academic background includes degrees in philosophy, literature, and religious studies, along with a concentration of work in art history. He and Norman Carr have been friends for more than 40 years, traveling internationally, along with Davenport’s wife, Laura. He lives in Wichita, Kansas. Learn more about his books at and http://www.poetsatwork.net.
