...to New York City

Broadway Boogie Woogie is a Mondrian's description of Manhattan streets in his painting style.

Colors: red, blue, yellow, white, and black.

Composition: symmetrical and grid-like structure, straight lines forming 90-degree angles.

Shapes: squares and rectangles.

Mondrian used straight lines to outline the streets. He colored the streets in yellow, allowing the viewers’ eyes to travel easily along the streets. In and around the intersections, darker squares are inserted to heavily contrast the bright yellow lines. When the eyes reach the dark colors, they stop in a short moment then continue along the yellow streets. By using color contrast, he gave the viewers the impression of the stop-and-go movement in Manhattan streets.

In addition, by using the colors, Mondrian also manipulated space. He used the dark and light colors to give the painting a bit of a 3D-sense. He used the brighter colors of yellow and red to give the impression of rising buildings and used the dark shades of blue to show the depth of the city details.

Besides, another aspect of the city that the color contrast portrays is the hustle and bustle of the big city New York. When viewed as a whole, the contrasting colors of yellow against red and blue add a sense of chaotic and noisy lifestyle while the straight lines keep the order that Mondrian included in all of his paintings. These two aspects combined perfectly portray the disorganized system of operation in a city.

Outside of the lines is negative space. Mondrian used the negative space to balance the colors in the positive space and prevent it from being solid color and being harsh in the viewers’ eyes.

Maybe, these researches are not so helpful for us in design but the concept is that: color is a very wonderful element. It seems like with color you can express anything you want in your works. I found it really interesting and unpredictable when I did the researches on color.
Let's enjoy some unbelievable miracle of color.

from Visual Sound...

Conflicted between a career in music and painting, Klee, a trained violinist, eventually chose painting. So music had a special influence on him. He made use of visual musical notes to "draw" his artworks. He believed that music could be translated quite directly into gradations of color and value, repetitions and changes of motif.

He made use of visual polyphony to "compose" many paintings, such as Plant Growth. Here he takes several shapes - equivalent to musical thematic material—such as circles, squares, and ovals, and develops them through intricate layers, in various sizes, colors, and placements. His composition of stacked forms here looks like decks of cards or color swatches, are attempts to freeze time in a static composition, to give visual feeling of lovely melodies.

One of the most abstract paintings, the wonderfully titled Ancient Sound, is composed of rough but precise squares of color, gray-green, earth-dark and black near the edges, jade, orange, vanilla and pale yellow at the center, all tilting very slightly to the right. For most of us, clear and bright colors make us think of high sounds, while dark images suggest low sounds. And like above, the composition of shapes and colors in this painting also is used to inform viewers of sound.

The Golden Ratio in Art

Now let's try to discover the golden ratio in art. We will concentrate on the artworks of Leonardo da Vinci. Here is the list of paintings to look at:

The Annunciation

The Mona Lisa

St. Jerome

1. The Annunciation - Draw in a horizontal line that is 61.8% of the way down the painting (0.618 - the inverse of the golden ratio). Draw another line that is 61.8% of the way up the painting. Try again with vertical lines that are 61.8% of the way across both from left to right and from right to left. So now we have four lines drawn across the painting. Notice that these lines intersect important parts of the painting, such as the angel, the woman, the trees, etc.

2. The Mona Lisa - Measure the length and the width of the painting itself. The ratio is, of course, golden. Draw a rectangle around Mona's face (from the top of the forehead to the base of the chin, and from left cheek to right cheek) and notice that this, too, is a golden rectangle.

3. St. Jerome - Draw a rectangle around St. Jerome. Conveniently, he just fits inside a golden rectangle.

Leonardo da Vinci's talent as an artist may well have been outweighed by his talents as a mathematician. He incorporated geometry into many of his paintings, with the golden ratio being just one of his many mathematical tools. Why do you think he used it so much? Experts agree that he probably thought that golden measurements made his paintings more attractive. Maybe he was just a little too obsessed with perfection. However, he was not the only one to use golden properties in his work.