Budding Artist: Sabia Javid
Meet Sabia Javid from Sheeri Baramulla who has carved niche at her young age as a budding artist with her distinctive style of paintings. Sabia, who is a first year college student, had a taste of painting and drawing from her childhood. It’s her love for this art form that despite having minimal resources and negative academic appreciation Sabia kept hold of her art practice. Along with her studies she has reserved a good amount of space for her art, painting at least a piece a day.
Sabia is keen at drawing and painting Portraits with prominent Kashmiri features in traditional attire. Her landscapes with bright and contrasting colors reflecting splendor of Kashmir valley also contributes to her collection of artworks. Her journey as an artist is filled with passion and immense enthusiasm to discover more about this creative field. According to her, making art keeps her mind at peace and learning more about such a field enthralls her.
“I have not formally got any training in any art school but I love art and it’s my love towards this field of expression that supports my journey as an artist. Painting is a vast field with amazing possibilities as well as complexities, and there is a lot to learn Thanks to Almighty I am improving day by day,” Sabia hope I can contribute my bit,”.
Sabia wants to get a chance and platform to exhibit her art works. She is presently studying in Government Degree College Baramulla.
Featured Artist :Wassily Kandinsky
“Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential”.
Kandinsky.
One of the pioneers of abstract modern art, Wassily Kandinsky was born in 1866 in Moscow. He spent most of his childhood in Odessa, a thriving, cosmopolitan city populated by Western Europeans, Mediterranean’s, and a variety of other ethnic groups. At an early age, Kandinsky exhibited an extraordinary sensitivity toward the stimuli of sounds, words, and colors. It was his father who recognized his precious gift and encouraged him for drawing classes, as well as piano and cello lessons. Despite his early exposure to arts, Kandinsky did not turn to painting until he reached the age of 30.
Kandinsky studied law, ethnography, and economics at University of Moscow. In spite of the legal focus of his academic pursuits, Kandinsky’s interest in color symbolism and its effect on human psyche grew throughout his time in Moscow. And an ethnographic research trip to Vologda in northwest Russia in 1889 exposed him to folk art impression of which Kandinsky carried with him throughout his career. After completing his degree in 1892, he started his career in law education by lecturing at the university.
Kandinsky took a lot of time to recognize his inner voice and finally in 1896 he abandoned his teaching career to attend art school in Munich. For his first two years in Munich he studied at the art school of Anton Azbe, and in 1900 he studied under Franz von Stuck at the Academy of Fine Arts. It was at Azbe’s school that he was first time introduced to the artistic avant-garde in Munich as he met Alexei Jawlensky. In 1901, along with three other young artists, Kandinsky co-founded “Phalanx” -an artist’s association opposed to the conservative views of the traditional art institutions. Phalanx expanded to include an art school, in which Kandinsky taught. Kandinsky spend a good amount of time to learn Expressionist movement and developed his own style based on his observation of diverse artistic sources.
Kandinsky exploited the evocative interrelation between color and form to create an aesthetic experience that engaged the sight, sound, and emotions of the public. He believed that total abstraction offered the possibility for profound, transcendental expression and that copying from nature only interfered with this process. Highly inspired to create art that communicated a universal sense of spirituality, he innovated a pictorial language that only loosely related to the outside world, but expressed volumes about the artist’s inner experience. His visual vocabulary developed through three phases, shifting from his early, representational canvases and their divine symbolism to his rapturous and operatic compositions, to his late, geometric and biomorphic flat planes of color. Kandinsky’s art and ideas inspired many generations of artists, from his students at the Bauhaus to the Abstract Expressionists after World War II.
Painting was, above all, deeply spiritual for Kandinsky. He sought to convey profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colors that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.
Kandinsky viewed non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode to express the “inner necessity” of the artist and to convey universal human emotions and ideas. He viewed himself as a prophet whose mission was to share this ideal with the world for the betterment of society.
Kandinsky viewed music as the most transcendent form of non-objective art – musicians could evoke images in listeners’ minds merely with sounds. He strove to produce similarly object-free, spiritually rich paintings that alluded to sounds and emotions through a unity of sensation.
After Germany declared war on Russia, Kandinsky was forced to leave the country. He traveled to Switzerland and Sweden with Munter for almost two years, but returned to Moscow in early 1916, which effectively ended their relationship. In Moscow he courted and married Nina Andreevskaia, the young daughter of a Czarist colonel. While there, he not only became familiar with the art of Constructivists and Suprematists like Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich, but also lived in the same building as Aleksander Rodchenko, and met other avant-garde luminaries like Naum Gabo, Lyubov Popova, and Varvara Stepanova. With the October Revolution in 1917, Kandinsky’s plans to build a private school and studio were upset by the Communist redistribution of private wealth and instead, he worked with the new government to develop arts organizations and schools. Despite his participation in the development of the officially sanctioned new institutions, he felt increasingly removed from the avant-garde. His search for spirituality in art did not meld with the utilitarian aesthetic advocated by the young government and the artists it embraced.
In 1921, when architect Walter Gropius invited Kandinsky to Germany to teach at the Weimar Bauhaus, he accepted and moved to Berlin with his wife, gaining German citizenship in 1928. As a member of the innovative school, Kandinsky’s artistic philosophy turned toward the significance of geometric elements – specifically circles, half-circles, straight lines, angles, squares, checkerboards, and triangles. In 1926, he published his second major theoretical work, Point and Line to Plane that outlined his ideas about a “science of painting.” In both his work and theory he shifted from the romantic, intuitive expression of his pre-war canvases to an emphasis on constructively organized compositions.
In 1933 Kandinsky left Germany when the Nazis closed the Bauhaus school and he moved to France where he remained for the rest of his life. While in France, his style again shifted and he experimented with biomorphic forms, which were more organic than the harsh geometric shapes of his Bauhaus paintings. Although he continued to paint until his last year, Kandinsky’s output slowed during the war and his art fell out of favor as the referential images of Cubism and Surrealism came to dominate the Parisian avant-garde. Despite his distance from the aesthetic forefront, Kandinsky continued to refine his style and revisited many of his previous themes and styles during this period, synthesizing elements of his entire oeuvre into vast, complex works. His late style combined the expressive palette of his earliest non-objective Compositions from the early 1910s with the more structured elements he investigated while at the Bauhaus as well as the biomorphic forms popularized by the Surrealists, like Joan Miró and Jean Arp.
The Nazis confiscated 57 of his canvases during their purge of “degenerate art” in 1937, but despite the Fascist proscription against his art, American patrons – notably Solomon R. Guggenheim – avidly collected his abstract work. His works became key in shaping the mission of the museum Guggenheim planned on opening dedicated to modern, avant-garde art. With over 150 works in the museum’s collection, Kandinsky became known as the “patron saint of the Guggenheim.” He died in December of 1944 in relative, but in serene isolation.
