Dan Harlow

“Colour possesses me… colour and I are one. I am a painter.”
- Paul Klee

German/Swiss painter Klee wrote those words in his diary during the 1920’s when he was on a trip to Tunisia. In his lectures he said “Colours do not sing in unison… but in a kind of three-part harmony,” and “how enormous are the differences between red and a colour which contains no red at all!”

Though famous for his use of color, Paul Klee was not as concerned with color as a subject before 1914. It was not until a trip to Tunisia in 1914 “where he discovered the emotive intensity of colour. His direct experience of the sensuality of the southern light was decisive on his work.” From that moment on Klee’s work shifted dramatically and evolved into the colorful, abstract masterpieces we enjoy 100 years later.

Klee’s work in abstract color as it turns out is not such an original idea after all. 11,000 years ago in Syria a “neolithic settlement of Djade al-Mughara on the Euphrates, northeast of the city of Aleppo” was home to hunter gatherers who had built a communal house with a wooden roof and painted a remarkable image on the rock walls. Before the village was abandoned and the house filled with mud, some unknown artist or artists created this modern looking masterpiece by using burnt hematite rock for the reds, crushed limestone for white and charcoal for the blacks.

From Yahoo:

Mustafa Ali, a leading Syrian artist, said similar geometric design to that in the Djade al-Mughara painting found its way into art throughout the Levant and Persia, and can even be seen in carpets and kilims (rugs).

The excavation has been ongoing in this region since the early 1990’s and has been headed up by a French team of archaeologists lead by Eric Coqueugniot. “France is an important contributor to excavation efforts in Syria, where 120 teams are at work. Syria was at the crossroads of the ancient world and has thousands of mostly unexcavated archaeological sites.”

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