Paulo Coelho's Blog: Character of the week: Kandinsky

Published on July 3, 2011 in Character of the Week.

Painting is an art. And art is a power that should be aimed at developing the soul. If art does not do this job, the abyss that separates us from God is left without a bridge. The artist owes his talent to God and has to settle this debt. To do this, he has to work hard, know that he is free in his art but not in his commitment to life. Everything he feels and thinks is part of the raw material with which to improve the spiritual atmosphere around him. Beauty, whether in art or in a woman, cannot be empty; it has to be at the service of humankind and the world. The true work of art is born from the ‘artist’: a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being. The artist is not a ‘Sunday child’ for whom everything immediately succeeds. He does not have the right to live without duty. The task that is assigned to him is painful, it is a heavy cross for him to bear. There is no must in art because art is free.

Wassily Kandinsky