Oneness Painted

Oneness (Simple Reality) is the worldview or context in which we experience the interconnectedness, interdependence and interrelatedness of all of Creation. This means that any form that is created by an artist or any idea occurring in the mind of another person can be experienced at a conscious or unconscious level by others.

The evolution of painting styles in the early 20th century demonstrates this connection. Painters Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) with his Black Lines (1913) and Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) with his Circular Forms: Sun and Moon (1912-13) experienced the influence of this Oneness paradigm. “In the early years of the decade a number of artists in various centers [cities] arrived almost simultaneously at complete abstraction.”[i]

Both painters had been struggling with finding a way to express “feeling” or that connection to the transcendent, what they might have called the soul if using a religious label. “Kandinsky wrote: ‘The harmony of color and form is solely based upon the principle of the proper contact with the human soul.’”

Both men expressed in words (that is, intellectually) what was better communicated in their paintings. “Like Kandinsky, Delaunay realized the deep emotional significance of color and its rhythms. He felt that color alone is form and subject; and that through colors, their contrasts and harmonies, he could reach directly to the ‘heartbeat of man himself.’”[ii]

Oneness Painted

[i]     Selz, Peter. Art in Our Times. New York: Harry N. Abrams. 1981, page 160.

[ii]     Ibid., page 161.

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Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry.

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