Piet Mondrian might just be the artist I admire most. This Dutch artist, who worked in the early 1900s mostly, sought to free visual art from the constraints of its past, and in doing so, he was not about to give us paintings of landscapes or portraits or anything depicting the natural world. Pure painting, to Piet Mondrian, was painting that referred to nothing outside itself. His formula was ingeniously simply: Squares, rectangles, grids, in primary colors (red, blue, yellow) plus white and black.
As Mondrian’s art refers to nothing outside itself, using it as the cover star for the Convivio Book of Days Calendar for March feels both exciting and a bit jarring to me. My search for an illustrative painting to use as a synthesis for March was getting me down, to be honest. The First of the month came and went. Air strikes were carried out on Iran. I fell into an all-too-common-these-days feeling of despair over what’s become of the world. It’s been the persistent underlying feeling in my life for these past fourteen months. This month felt suddenly like it needed something new: something pure. In its strange way, Composition II, which Piet Mondrian painted in 1929, when my mother and father both were 3 years old, brings that, at least to me. I don’t know if it’ll bring the same to you, but if it does, so be it. There is intelligence and there are lofty goals in this painting, a feeling, to me, of universal hope. That we can do better.
By the time you read this, the Hindu festival of Holi, the springtime festival of color, will have begun. I don’t know much about Holi but my friend Pranoo invited me to a Holi celebration once and it very well may have been the most joyous thing I’ve seen. Color exploding everywhere, everyone covered in the stuff. I remember asking a man, as I left the celebration, if I might take his picture. He said yes. He was a grown adult, he was bald, he was carrying a shopping bag, and he and his bag and his clothes were covered in red and purple and blue and he stood there beaming. He was so happy. How can you possibly capture that in a painting?
COME SEE US at the SHOP
We’re opening the shop the middle two weekends of March for our Springtide Markets, where you can stock up on special things for the upcoming Easter season: handmade pysanky from Ukraine, handmade wooden bunnies from Germany and Sweden, paper egg containers from Germany, Swedish sweet and sour candies and licorice for your Easter basket, books and cards and more. Saturday & Sunday, March 14 & 15 and March 21 & 22, from 11 AM to 4 PM each day. Plenty of nice things for St. Patrick’s Day, too! Shop online, too!
And come see us at the Taco Fiesta this Saturday, March 7, from 2 to 8 PM! We’ll have a pop-up shop there with lots of our traditional Artesanías Méxicanas. This festival celebrating tortillas and Mexican culture is held annually in nearby Palm Springs, Florida. There will be a marimba band! I’m very excited about that.
Image: “Composition II” by Piet Mondrian. Oil on canvas, 1929 [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons.
Happy March! I love your calendar and you’ve introduced me to some holidays I did not know about, thank you very much! Here’s to hoping we don’t get too hot this summer and have a nice, long, mild spring on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts!
Hi Mary Beth, I’m glad to introduce you to some new days! I’m guessing St. Urho’s Day is one of them. That’s a most obscure celebration.