Piet Mondrian

I was kind of tired and decided to take a break. To tell the truth I was totally bored. Who doesn’t get bored installing a server whose installation guide has proven to be incomplete and in some sense mistaken? Besides, at the moment of the compilation all of us pray to all gods with the hope that no errors are going to come up...could anybody tell me when their prayers have been answered and a little window pop up saying: “The installation has finished successfully and BTW, don’t worry, your queries are going to run without any problem”?

Anyway, this post is about the find of a painter and not a complain about mondrian documentation. The painter, as the software, was named Mondrian, Piet Mondrian. I got interested in this artist and I started looking for more information about him. Mondrian was born in the Netherlands, on March 7, 1872 and passed away in 1944. He founded (and named) Dutch movement known as Neo-Plasticism. "It is a rigid form of Abstraction, whose rules allow only for a canvas subsected into rectangles by horizontal and vertical lines, and colored using a very limited palette."[Artcyclopedia].

I found this kind of painting very unusual, I even dare to say "simple". Why did this painter try to show us a world with only horizontal lines, vertical lines, three primary colors (red, yellow and blue) and three different tones (white, gray, and black). Isn't that absurd?. Nevertheless, I remembered a quote by Mark Twain "A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds".

"A guy who abandoned forms that resemble the natural world"...

In The New Art--The New, his collected writings, Mondrian said that "what we perceive with our eyes are deceiving. He said that the naturalistic world has veiled us from the true reality. According to him, the reality lies behind the naturalistic world. For this reason, he abandoned forms that resemble the natural world. He refused to paint anything that look life-like (or realistic) and representational. Once he has discovered that he has been deceived by the naturalistic world, he began his journey of abstraction. He evolved gradually through his forms, abstracting from what he sees until only the "essence" is left. According to Mondrian, this essence can be manifested through the use of two types of lines (horizontal and vertical), the primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) and three different tones (white, gray, and black)." Chinhong Lim Chang

Finally, I came across a funny game called Mondrimat. It allows web surfers to create Mondrian-like images. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and let me know your marvelous works!

To know more aboout Piet Mondrian you can go to: Artcyclopedia, 3d-dali Artist Biographies