Art became an emotional aesthetic experience for Kandinsky as he created paintings that were non-representational and full of, what he referred to as spiritual vibration. He felt that only a true poet and a master of shape could create abstract art, his influence was nothing short of a cultural grenade with his conviction that art should be concerned with the spiritual rather than the material. No Semblance of Meaning is a 2005 painting portfolio by local artist Randy Titus. Abstract art served as an inspiration point for the artworks included, particularly Malevich’s Suprematism manifesto, and Malevich’s strange theory that the visual phenomena of the objective world was in itself...meaningless. To test this concept, Titus began to paint non-objective shapes on a series of squares. Typical of the abstract art world, he would describe his process and what led to the creation of the work: “I paper-masked the squares quickly and painted the opening pure white as a base to push color into”. These odd abstractions of shape attempted to be devoid of meaning or had no recognizable symbol of reality. This spiritual art experiment also had roots in Titus’s dedication to Zen meditation. He explored the Buddhist idea of “mu” or “no-mind” in his artistic creative process and completed the first part of the project relatively without meaning. As his oil painting squares became a portfolio, and the layers of the work manifested, he sought to recreate his own experience for the general public.
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No Semblance was meant to push the viewer on a journey of non-meaning, but began mapping meaning over the images with absurd text and small graphic symbols. The totality of
Randy Titus, No Semblance portfolio images (image courtesy of Lew Blink)
the project was similar to a Zen koan in that it would confound the viewer and jolt them into their own thought process. The portfolio contained 24 squares, all filled with shape, color and meaninglessness. The individual squares are labeled and numbered with absurdist text descriptions such as Plate 7, Dance of the Gods, relates to the discovery of ceramic tiles in Hesperone. The tile designs were based on a traditional dance of the gods for the upbeat vestibular gavotte, a metaphysical choreography of a forgotten civilization. Of course there is no Hesperone or ceramic tiles, Titus was making it all up. At the heart of No Semblance of
Meaning is a supremacy of feeling that is not easily described in words — a notion that moves the viewer from non-meaning toward a transcendent understanding that ushers us hopefully toward our own non-representational spiritual experience. Randy Titus was a classically trained painter, philosopher, graphic artist, teacher and chess club coach. He was fond of saying about his art: “you either get it or you don’t.” He passed away early last year, and his legacy is currently being discovered.
www.dumpsterarcheology.org
THE ART EDUCATION OF PAULA MODERSOHN-BECKER By Susan Bawell Weber Paula Modersohn-Becker was a German painter, at the forefront of early Expressionism. She was born Paula Becker in 1876 in Dresden, where she grew up with her family before moving to Bremen in 1888. One of seven children, she grew up in a cultivated and intellectual household. At her father’s insistence, she completed her training to become a teacher and then studied from 1892 to 1896 at art schools and private institutions in Bremen. She spent 1892 at the 17 ALLTHEARTSTL.COM SPRING 2019
London School of Arts and the period of 1896 to 1898 at the association of Berlin Women Artists at a time when women were still not admitted to many art schools.
and his wife, Clara Westhoff, who were often in Worpswede. Becker then married Modersohn in 1901. This would prove to be a difficult relationship.
After meeting members of the artists’ colony in Worpswede in 1898, Becker decided to join them. She felt that she could more easily achieve artistic simplicity in a rural environment, and she studied there with Fritz Mackensen and Otto Modersohn. She became close friends with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke
Of all of the Worpswede group, Modersohn-Becker was most concerned with art history and modern art. During this time, her themes were drawn from the everyday peasant community around her as she attempted to depict a simple, naturalistic rural life. After becoming disenchanted with the
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