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[[image]] 16. Excerpts from: WHAT AND WHEN IS PAINTING? TODAY by OSCAR BLUEMNER "...We are right in valuing above all the old masters, the primatives, and the great landscape painters of ancient China for their sublime and 'pure' painting, because their colors were strong and pure, that is, untarnished, unweakened, uncomplicated by irrelevant and unemotional considerations...because the entire orient sees and our own antiquity from the byzantine mosaics up to the rationalistic renaissance saw and used color in painting only emotionally, only through imagination. What does not come from a painter's imagination does not go to the spectator's soul." "...Take a steel bar; it is hard, rigid, cold fact. Reality If you heat it, it glows red, and now you can bend it and twist it any way. Let intense emotion fire your imagination or memory of scenes (we live with) and the colors of things, or of night will glow with the hues of corresponding moods, the lines and shapes of things will sway and twist as if they were human. The space is set with actors. So far all is literary-human. Now let colors as psychological plasma create their own forms (cells) instead of letting the stupid photographic forms of reality dictate to still more stupid and pretty colors. As a painter, say not: the tree is green, a rock or twilight, or meadow are green. Buy say: green is like a tone in an octave or like a force. Green can become a tree, a meadow and so forth. Say: there is a feeling-world 'red', and find out in life and nature what significances it takes on by way of directions and objective shapes." "...Whenever, in chemically pure imagination, one color-sensation fuses with a correlated form, you have an aesthetic compound of a higher (psychological) order, an element of painting. When sulphur and mercury are heated together they form a new substance, vermillion, of new and different properties. Thus a painting, when it is a compound of emotion and reality, of color fused with form, has properties absolutely different from those of either alone. It is not any more the original feeling, or the experience; there are not longer the objects, the things, the 'what'." "...Concentrate and think in colors 'related to all the humanities, to all factors of the mind'. Try it and watch your step."