Symbolism and the use of icons is a quick and efficient, and often times, universally understood way to convey a message - but mostly boring to look at. For example, the silhouette of a skirted person indicates a restroom for females. Or the pictogram of the inside of an open hand often means “Stop!”. That concept made me think.
How do I put a message, a quote or an abstract meaning into a piece of art without the use of readable lettering - that you like to look at?
There are these motivational pictures you can find in offices, like a flying eagle with the word “Leadership”, or “Dare To Soar” underneath it. Would you get the message if you just saw the flying eagle? The works I like to make are trying to accomplish that: a word or a couple of words turned into art, with no letters visible. The word becomes the art.
I came across the phenomenon of synesthesia. It is a neurological condition (not a desease!) in which information meant to stimulate one of your senses stimulates several of your senses. In other words, it is a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color. Others, wherever they look, they see letters, hear certain types of music, or experience certain tastes in their mouths. Or the other way round. My focus is on synthesists looking at a color they see a certain letter. Every synthesist has his or her own “color alphabet”, that they cannot change as their brains are wired that way. For example, for one, the color orange stands for “E” whereas for someone else it is a “T”.
The majority of people are not synthesists – they cannot see letters when they look at colors. I can not. But I am fascinated by it and decided to bring that into my art. The color alphabet I tend to use is based on Christian Faur’s. In future works I will make up my own, random, color alphabets.
In addition to concept of synesthesia, I incorporate how frequently a letter appears in any given language. For example, “E” appears 12.02%, and “T” 9.10% in the English language. Click here if you want to read more. In my works where objects are differently sized, they often represent different letters, in addition to being differently colored. One exception is my work “Kellyanne’s Cubism”. The triangles are randomly sized.
Another aspect I use to construct my artworks is the theory of the ”Golden Ratio”. In short, it is the relationship from one to the other as 1:1.618. As an example, a picture frame that is deemed most pleasing to the eye has a width of 1.618 times its height: say, the picture frames height is 8 inches which makes its ideal width 12.94 (rounded up to 13) inches. 8 multiplied by 1.618 = 12.944. The ideal picture frame would be 8”x13”.
Now, a bit about me:
I from Bayreuth, Germany and now live in Summit, New Jersey, USA. I used to live for a considerable time in London, England, where I saw the theater production “The Pitman Painters” by Lee Hall. It’s a play about unemployed miners in the UK whose union arranged for them to learn how to paint. Some were more talented than others which causes friction. In one scene, one of the unemployed miners turned artists dismisses a work of one of his fellows as “I could have painted that!”, upon which that minor’s mentor replies “Yes, but he did it”. That sentence was my trigger to start painting.
I am not represented by a gallery. Some of my works can be found in private residences in France, Spain, England, Germany and the USA.
I would love to hear from you: wolfgang@wolfgangguenther.com
Thanks for reading!