The Mystic Visionary (OIMN)

Your sense of beauty

Looking at the geometric patterns in an illustrated encyclopedia or the arrangement of stars in the night sky flips a particular switch in you. What draws you deeply is work that takes the invisible laws and order behind the visible world and builds them perfectly into a code of its own. Faced with a creator who has devised a private theory or system of signs and used it to draw out an enormous vision, you feel intellectual excitement and a deep exhilaration. Mere copying of reality will not satisfy you; you find absolute beauty in expression where mathematical exactness and the scale of an unseen world become one.

What moves you

The moment you see an old star chart of combined figures and symbols and sense, behind its perfect arrangement, the law of the universe. Or the experience of a weighty, unheard-of resonance filling the hall until you seem to see particles of light spreading out.

The beauty you tend to overlook

Small everyday events that carry no special theory and no grand vision. In time spent taking the warmth of the tea in front of you or an ordinary conversation exactly as it is, without demanding deep meaning, there is a goodness that loosens the mind.

The composer in tune with you: Alexander Scriabin

In the symphony Prometheus, completed in 1910, Scriabin established an intervallic structure of his own known as the "mystic chord." He also wrote a part for a color organ (luce) into the orchestral score, envisioning sound and colored light working together throughout the whole space. A system of his own that unified sound and light through his own theory resonates with your sense of beauty.

The painter who resonates with you: Hilma af Klint

Af Klint recorded the meanings of colors and forms — spirals and circles — in detailed notebooks, working out a system of signs of her own. In works such as The Tree of Knowledge, vivid geometric figures and symbols are set in order across enormous sheets. A manner of painting that makes invisible laws visible through rules of her own devising overlaps with your love of structure and mystery.

What links the two

There is no historical connection between the two. But they share a quality: reducing the laws of an invisible world to orderly rules of their own — a private harmonic theory, a private code of color — and drawing them out from there.

Three paintings for you

The Tree of Knowledge, No. 1

Hilma af Klint

The Swan, No. 17

Hilma af Klint

The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood

Hilma af Klint