Paul Klee Repost.

This post from 2007 was originally made on Travels with Charley before it was dedicated to political things. I only had one blog up to Travels with Charley and that was Y!360. When it looked like it was going down I opened here on Blogspot. For some reasons I cannot explain this Paul Klee post has gotten a lot of hits lately and it seemed like it should be on Creative Journey so I am reposting it here.

Original Post:

I had a college room mate that was a direct descendent of Paul Klee. We actually had a signed and numbered print of his in our dorm room. It was my first introduction to this whimsical Swiss born painter.

Cat and Bird


Klee was started out on the path to be a musician and began playing the violin at eight. At that time he was also given a box of chalk by his grandmother and encouraged to draw. I think there is something musical about his compositions, maybe because of this. Especially I can see the influence of the string instruments in his work.

Captive


Klee worked with many different types of media—oil paint, watercolor, ink, and more. He often combined them into one work becoming the father of mixed media. The above painting is done on fabric pasted to a board. He has been associated with expressionism, cubism and surrealism, but does not fit into one school of art.

His works, like the Cat and Bird one, often have a fragile child-like quality to them and are usually on a small scale. They frequently allude to poetry, music and dreams and can include words or musical notation. His later works, which are my personal favorites, are distinguished by spidery hieroglyph-like symbols which he famously described as "taking a line for a walk".

As illustrated in this work entitled Contemplating.



Or this work called The Twittering Machine.



Yellow Birds and is my favorite.



For more information on Paul Klee see Wiki.