Kandinsky, Wassily. Point and Line to Plane. (Trans. Hilla Rebay). New York: Dover, 1979.
I found Kandinsky's ideas on the basic elements of art to be so obvious that I often overlooked them. I never looked at lines, points, shapes, and planes as having their own life and personalities before. In this book, Kandinsky tries to explain the many different characteristics that all the elements mentioned above have.
Kandinsky shows his ideas with an explanation of the Point, or Dot. He explains that the Point is "an invisible thing" that represents the ultimate symbol for silence (25). He goes further to explain,
The point digs itself into the plane and asserts itself for all time. Thus it presents the briefest, constant, innermost assertion: short, fixed and quickly created. Therefore, the point, in its outer and inner sense, is the proto-element of painting and especially of the graphic. (32)
Only by tearing the Point from its usual surroundings and influence,
can it be heard and understood more clearly. Kandinsky gives several
examples of sentences where the period, which is a point, is shifted
throughout several positions within the same sentence. Through this
experiment, the importance of the point is made evident. Kandinsky also
equates art with
music by saying that the point produces two distinct sounds. These are
the "absolute sound of the point" and the "sound of the
given location in the basic plane" (37).
Before reading this book, I thought of the point as just a plain dot. I'm now aware that everything to include not only the point, but line and plane, all have a critical effect on the outcome of a painting. Kandinsky supports my new awareness in the following statement, "A composition is the inwardly-purposeful subordination of the individual elements and of the build up (construction) toward the goal of concrete pictorial" (37).