In The Wood – by Kandinsky (1912)...

The wood grew denser and denser.  The red trunks thicker and thicker.  The green foliage heavier and heavier.  The air darker and darker.  The brushes more and more profuse.  The toadstools more and more numerous.  In the end one found oneself treading on nothing but toadstools.  The man found it more and more difficult to walk, to push his way through without slipping.  But he went on, repeating more and more quickly the same sentence: – Healing scars. Corresponding colors. To his left and a little behind him walked a woman.  Each time the man stopped saying...

From Comus by Milton...

the sage poets, taught by the heavenly Muse, Storied of old in high immortal verse Of dire chimeras and enchanted isles, And rifted rocks whose entrance leads to hell; For such there be, but unbelief is blind. Within the navel of this hideous wood, Immured in cypress shades, a sorcerer dwells, Of Bacchus and of Circe born, great Comus, Deep-skilled in all his mother;s witcheries, And here to every thirsty wanderer By shy enticement gives his baneful cup, With many murmurs mixed, whose pleasing poison The visage quite transforms of him that drinks, And the inglorious likeness...

Henry Fuseli...

Benjamin Haydon writes: I followed the maid into a gallery or show room, enough to frighten anybody at twilight.  Galvanized devils — malicious witches brewing their incantations — Satan bridging Chaos, and springing upwards like a pyramid of fire — Lady Macbeth — Paolo and Francesca — Falstaff and Mrs. Quickly — humour, pathos, terror, blood and murder, met one at every look!  I expected the floor to give way — I fancied Fuseli himself to be a giant.  I heard his footsteps and saw a little bony hand slide round the edge of the door,...

The Principle of Internal Necessity...

Kandinsky writes: …It is clear that the harmony of colors can only be based upon the principle of purposefully touching the human soul. ~ On the Spiritual in Art, 1912

Roderick Usher, the Paintings of...

Edgar Allan Poe writes:  I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher.  Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations in which he involved me or led me the way.  An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous luster over all.  His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears.  Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. ...

Turner’s Liber Studiorum...

Lionel Lindsay writes:  To safeguard his work from future plagiarists, and keep a record of his compositions, Claude was accustomed to make a pen-drawing of each finished work before it left his easel. The record was never intended for publication, but at the end of the eighteenth century, when Claude’s art dominated the taste of English collectors, Boydell issued an edition of these drawings, engraved, and very badly engraved, by Earlom, under the title of Liber Veritatis. It has however one happy result, for it inspired Turner’s  friend W.F. Wells to press upon...

Dangerous Imagination...

Hamerton writes:  …imagination in its primary sense must be the seeing of images in the mind’s eye, and that the images so seen are illusions.  When the images appear to be seen with the physical eye as if they were external realities, then they are no longer imaginings but hallucinations, and the condition of the brain which is subject to these hallucinations is so near to insanity, that the victim remains sane only just so lonng as he is able to say to himself, ‘The thing that I see there is not real, although it appears real for the moment; it is nothing...

Chiura Obata...

Some huge, aged oak tree with millions of leaves can appear differently on a hot day, a cool morning or just after a rain shower; so many characteristics and changes in Nature which are interesting to watch and study. ~ Sumi-e, 1967

Robert Burns...

From An Epistle to John Lapraik, an old Scottish Bard. 1785: I am nae Poet, in a sense, But just a rhymer, like, by chance, An’ ha’e to learning nae pretence, Yet, what the matter? Whene’er my Muse does on me glance, I jingle at her Your critic-folk may cock their nose, And say, “How can you e’er propose, You wha ken hardly verse frae prose, To mak a sang?” But by your leaves, my learned foes, Ye’re maybe wrang. What’s a’ your jargon o’ your schools, Your Latin names for horns an’ stools; If honest Nature made...

Cyril Pearce on Colour...

The mystery of colour, with its fluctuating phenomena, has been a favourite subject for speculation from the earliest time, for it has been, and still is, associated with rituals, feasts, and the whole gamut of the emotions. To-day it occupies the attention of the physicist, the psychologist, and the artist…Whilst the physicist examines the laws governing its appearance with delicate instruments at handm ready to measure its varying aspects, the psychologist notes its effect on the individual mind. The one measures the stimuli whilst the other observes the response. ...