Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents, George Braziller

RonPrice · Joined: 02 Nov 2006 Posts: 53 Location: Launceston

I have just posted two prose-poems about the art and approach of artist Paul Klee because I found his words an inspiration. I have written below just how I have found his philosophy inspirational. I hope readers find my interpretation useful.-Ron Price, Tasmania

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THE CENTRAL POWER-HOUSE

The Swiss artist Paul Klee(1879-1940) tried to fuse the world that appeared to his senses and that world beyond his sensory emporium. The more I have read of Klee’s posthumous writings, his letters and diaries,1 literary resources which first appeared just as I was beginning my pioneering adult life in 1962, the more I find a deep resonance between his writing and my own literary and poetic efforts especially in these years of the early evening of my life, age 55 to 65. Perhaps this is due to what art critic Robert Hughes referred to as Klee’s “withdrawn meditative centre.”2 My centre could certainly be described in these same terms as I am now on an old age pension in my 65th year.

Klee faithfully recorded the events of his inner and outer life from the age of nineteen until he was forty. I just began to record my events at the age of forty—the last twenty-five years. The goal of the creative person, wrote Klee in his diary, is not to be precocious, but to master life and to achieve as mature an attitude as possible to the existential world and its many forms of life. Klee also wrote that a creator/artist must be: poet, explorer of nature and philosopher.

When I am happy I write of the here and now in a world I am creating, constructing, enchanting and inventing. The philosopher Edmund Burke once expressed the nature of history itself as: a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn"—and so it is that I, too, reside as much with the dead and the unborn. In these years, too, and in a much more significant sense than the historian Edward Gibbon wrote: “the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind,” I write of these historic epochs. It is as if from the void that I write. The world around me vanishes in the process in some micro-and-macro absorbing drama of retrospection, introspection, anticipation and surprise. Perhaps, for me as well as Klee, our work is a compensation for many of life’s lived and bitter hours. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents, George Braziller, Inc., NY, 1962; and 2 Robert Hughes, “Inward Projections,” Time, 30 November 1970.

Appreciate this world of distraction,
you told me, before returning to my
work-a-day grey. Art must penetrate
below the surface as my words probe
down to the heart on a road longer
than my life and on a road down in
to my mind in the act of my writing.

I must create my own world, you said,
drawing on the Central Power-house of
all time and space. But I must not rush,
that is hard, Paul, for it all comes so fast.

The central problem artists have, you said,
was that they have no sense of community,
people for whom and with whom they work.1
That is not true for me, Paul: I have been a
writer-in-community for decades especially
since the beginning of community building
in this new paradigm of culture and growth
as I go about bringing order into the passing
stream of image and experience, of branching
and spreading arrays drawing from that Root.

1 From “Paul Klee: Art of Klee,” At Serdar-hizli-art.com internet site.

Ron Price
7 November 2008

Chrissy D · Joined: 12 Jan 2006 Posts: 1048 Location: Queensland

Hi Ron,

I can feel your passion and influence for Klee and how he has inspired you.

I particularly liked

RonPrice · Joined: 02 Nov 2006 Posts: 53 Location: Launceston

thanks for the feedback....yours words of apprecation are....appreciated.-Ron