POTD: Organic Mondrian

POTD: Organic MondrianOrganic Mondrian Bozeman, Montana 2013

I have, as you may have noticed, an occasional interest or fascination with the paintings of Piet Mondrian. Or rather his later paintings in what Rick Steves calls his “T-square” style. He actually started out painting realistic landscapes but his interest changed over time to abstract work. So what are these T-square paintings supposed to symbolize if anything, I wondered (because it might provide a basis for understanding my own interest in them). According to the (very little) critical assessment of Mondrian’s work that I’ve read, it seems he viewed the up and down and left and right lines as representations of opposite ends of nature’s dualities such as man and woman, humans and nature, good and evil, etc. while their asymmetrical arrangement into grids symbolize the balancing of these various dualities. What do the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue mean? I haven’t read anything specifically about them but think perhaps, since his paintings are supposed to represent nature at it’s most basic, their use is sufficient to represent all the colors of nature since any hue or shade can be formed by combination of the three primary colors. Anyway, given that background, perhaps what I’m trying to do with these Mondrianesque photos is to attempt to represent this same kind of simplification of nature photographically. Or maybe I’m just drawn to natural arrangements of simple geometric shapes such as occurs in buildings, my grain elevator photos being a prime example. In the spirit of Mondrian I suppose today’s sidewalk and curb POTD photo takes this attraction of mine towards the extreme end of simplification.]]>

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