Mondrian in Motion

Bonvilston Digital Art

“Mondrian in Motion” is the title of a digital art project that takes the work of Piet Mondrian into the digital age. The idea is to take the basic concept of his neoplasticism period forward into a world made possible by digital editing technology. It can introduce the concept of movement in many forms. It takes a step away from Piet’s original concept of using primary colours and black lines to express feeling.

Another way in which Mondrian’s work can be extended is through reintroducing some elements of “real life” into the stark abstract images. This is intended to draw comparisons between reality and the spirit.

Part 1 of this presentation tells the development of the classic style of Piet Mondrian’s work, from naturalistic beginnings through to his later work developing the concept of Neoplasticism.

Part 2 of it will demonstrate the development of that style through the “Mondrian in Motion” project digital artwork produced by Bonvilston Digital Art

The Development of Mondrian’s Style.

Piet Mondrian was a Dutch artist, born in 1872 in Amersfoort, in the Netherlands. He followed his father into a career in teaching, but his motives were more to do with financial security to follow his main love in life - painting.

The development of his work followed the changes in the predominant styles of the age, until he really had developed his unique style. Much of his early work was naturalistic and centred on the everyday objects and scenes that he came across in his predominantly rural environment.

His early work wandered through impressionism, fauvism and pointillism. The range of work from the early years shows no indication of the purely abstract style that he was to become famous for later.

It was in 1907 that we first started to see hints of where Mondrian was going. It was in this year that he first began to paint images where the colours were being used to express his inner feelings.

If a cloud was painted red to express his feelings about what it represented than the more realistic colour then that was what he started to do.

Alongside was the trend for his rural paintings to show the countryside as more abstracted horizons expressing the vast expanses outside of a man’s immediate vision. This was probably a result of his involvement at that time in the Netherlands Theosophical Society, who constantly discussed the place of man in relation to the infinite expanse of the universe.

During this same period Mondrian also began to produce paintings of individual structures, particularly buildings. What became quite clear was that whilst he associate landscapes with vast horizontal expanses, when it came to buildings, he saw them as essentially vertical. It was as if he was seeing horizontal as nature and vertical as man made.

During this period Mondrian was clearly developing a style that was able to express the contrasts and conflicts in key existential elements of the universe. The contrasting colours and the vertical and horizontal contrasts were being used to express these contrasts.

Another common motif at the time was the painting of a single tree. This was being used to illustrate the man made world of structures going vertically (the tree trunk) whilst the infinite number of natural elements, making mankind understand more and more of the universe, were the horizontal or natural component ( the branches.) The Tree represented the interplay of these two forces with the branches pulling man outside of his everyday world whilst the trunk acted like an anchor drawing him back to the essential humanity of his world.

Whilst Mondrian was trying to express some fundamental truths about the place of man in the universe, at the same time a new movement was gathering pace - Cubism.

As with other artistic movements, Mondrian was able to take Cubism on board and to make it further develop what he was trying to convey at a deeper level. The tree evolved. This evolution really begins to give a feel for where Mondrian was to go in his search for interpreting the existential through his painting.

It was following this period, from around 1906, that we see the start of the structured use of colours being added to the stylised use of vertical and horizontal contrasts. These were increasingly presented as rectangles which included vertical and horizontal elements.

In the early part of this development, the colours yellow red and blue were used to represent the natural elements in a picture. The black and grey rectangles were seen as representing the spiritual elements.

Over time Mondrian began to consider the lack of constancy in the world he was trying to represent. This was seen in his paintings through a number of compositional techniques.

There began to develop a greater sense of importance of the white areas of the canvas. This was further enhanced by the idea of using a diamond shape to his canvases, whilst keeping the vertical and horizontal elements of this original thought processes. The effect of both of these changes was to introduce greater dynamism into his basic structure.

World War II saw Mondrian move away from the confines of the Netherlands. He moved in 1938 to London and then in 1940 to new York. This had the effect of releasing him from the constraints of his upbringing and freed him mentally to try some new ideas out.

He began to use colour in his lines rather than just within the rectangles. He also started to use more complex line structures and the overall degree of complexity of the shapes of the canvas and the shapes within the canvas was increasing.

Mondrian in Motion

This second part of this presentation moves on from what Mondrian created himself to what he might have created had he lived on into the 21st century. It was in so many ways a different world to Mondrian’s.

The early 20th Century was a far more static world than our present times. The rapid and increasingly speedy pace of change over the intervening period means that it would have been inevitable that Mondrian would have moved on to include a sense of motion and change within his canvasses.

The first few images show this done using modern digital editing software to add a sense of movement to the black lines of the original Mondrian paintings of his neoplasticist period.

The concept applies equally to the later variants, such as this diamond shaped image with an overwhelmingly white background.

This shot also adds movement of the coloured rectangles. The intention was to represent the idea that the boundaries between the natural and the man made elements has become a lot less easy to identify.

Today we have Dolly the sheep, three parent babies and Genetically Modified crops and biogenetic engineering of humans themselves. This breaks down the borders.

The next stage in the development was to make the movement time related. This is done by the use of curvature of the lines. In a sense this also represents the lack of certainty in the universe today compared to a century ago

The greater the uncertainty, the greater the degree of curvature in the piece of art

Another increasingly important feature of life in the 21st century is the amount of background noise.

Whether it is the internet, 24 hour Rolling News channels, or Mobile Phones, the amount of background interference in our day to day life has undoubtedly increased and would surely have been illustrated in Mondrian’s work.

On the following few pages are a few more examples of artwork based on Mondrian’s style, but reflecting the changed environment of the 21st Century.

More of these can be seen ( and bought as one off unique prints ) at the Bonvilston Digital Art website:-

www.bonvilston.org.uk

See much more of original digital art at our website :

www.bonvilston.org.uk