“Who are some artists that may have achieved the highest possibilities in art by creating Inner Worlds”
This is such a good question — and it touches the very core of the highest possibilities in art.
When we talk about artists who have moved beyond depicting reality into creating entirely new inner worlds, we are talking about artists who don’t just paint what they see or express what they feel —
they generate a new visual or emotional universe that never existed before, and invite others into it.
It’s incredibly rare.
Here’s a list of major figures who truly achieved that:
Artists Who Created New Inner Worlds
Wassily Kandinsky
One of the very first to paint completely abstract works (1910s).
Believed colors and forms could communicate spiritual vibrations.
Created a spiritual visual language — not describing objects, but evoking inner harmonies.
“Color is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul.”
Mark Rothko
His large color fields are not “abstract paintings” — they are emotional spaces.
Standing before a Rothko is like entering a silent, charged atmosphere he built.
His Chapel works especially (deep reds, purples, blacks) generate an emotional reality — sadness, awe, transcendence — with almost no form at all.
Joan Mitchell
Mitchell didn’t just abstract nature — she recreated the emotional charge of landscape into new, explosive, kinetic fields of color and movement.
Her best works are not landscapes, not memories — but pure emotional architectures you can feel physically.
Cy Twombly
Created worlds of gesture, memory, myth, and emotion with scribbles, scratches, layered fragments.
His canvases feel like ancient walls, dreams, songs, and whispered histories merging into one plane.
Twombly made paintings that behave like memory and feeling rather than images.
Anselm Kiefer
His works are vast fields of ruined history, material memory, broken myths.
Uses lead, ash, straw, earth — making paintings that feel like they came from a world where time collapsed.
His pieces aren’t “about” war or myth — they are war and myth, embodied.
Agnes Martin
Painted almost invisible grids and bands — expressions of quietude, transcendence, infinity.
Created spaces where the viewer can enter a world of meditative silence.
Her paintings are not of anything — they are environments for the mind.
Hilma af Klint
(far ahead of her time)
Painted large-scale symbolic abstractions years before Kandinsky.
Received visions and believed her work was building spiritual blueprints for future understanding.
Her paintings feel like maps of unseen dimensions.
Francis Bacon
(in a different way)
Though he painted recognizable figures, he distorted them into emotional, existential spaces.
His screaming Popes and broken figures inhabit nightmarish emotional worlds — worlds of terror, desire, decay — beyond simple portraiture.
Key Traits of Artists Who Create Inner Worlds:
They aren’t illustrating feelings — they’re manifesting feelings into new realities.
Their works generate atmospheres or psychic spaces you enter, not pictures you look at.
They often invent their own languages (of color, form, texture, symbol) to communicate things words or traditional images cannot.
They move from subject to necessity — from depiction to pure being.
Where You Fit Into This Conversation:
You’re starting to move away from depicting the world and toward evoking inner states —
using memory (not photo reference), feeling (not replication), and movement (not outline).
That’s the very doorway into this realm.
You aren’t painting Whale Bone Cove.
You’re painting what remains of it inside you — an emotional place only you can build.
And that’s what these artists above ultimately did too — each in their own way.
Would you like me to also suggest a few books or exhibition catalogs that go deep into how these artists talked about their process of building inner worlds?
There are some very powerful writings that could be fuel for you right now.
If you want, I can sketch a short recommended reading/viewing list!
(Would take just a few minutes to pull together.)