For this week’s looking out post, I decided to use Piet Mondrian’s piece: Composition No. 10 Pier and Ocean, created in 1915.
The inspiration behind this piece was the rhythms created by the waves in the ocean hitting and splashing against pier. However, he uses a randomness to illustrate the rhythm and feel of the pier and ocean. From first impression, one would view Mondrian’s piece as a very random, abstract piece. In reality, the “randomness” behind his work is a very calculated randomness.
Mondrian considered art as a reflection of the spirituality of nature. By creating artwork that was stripped down to the very basics, he hopes to show the energy and balance of the forces in nature. He used simple vertical and horizontal shapes to represent the positive and negative universal energies. Every line and space in his works is carefully placed to reflect the energies of nature and recreate the balance in a visual form.