Abstraction
My secret fetish.
Early in my career I knew I had to develop a style and stick to it. ‘Choose one thing and get really good at it’ a curator once told me. Just last week on a video conference Eric Smith from Redwood Media emphasize it again, ‘choose just one theme/style to show’.
I started working figuratively about 20 years ago and still feel as passionate about it as ever. I know that in reality they are all self-portraits and recently it dawned upon me that perhaps I create these figures to provide comfort. However, when the chaos in my mind gets overwhelming it is sometimes hard to arrange it in a sensible way.
What is abstract art
Summing up abstraction in a few paragraphs feels like a daunting task. But let’s try. For much of history art were created of things as they appeared but about 100 years ago that changed. Cultural and political life changed drastically (two world wars, industrialization, rise of communism, fascism etc) Traditional art were no longer equipped to express the challenges that the 20th century brought. As life changed, representations of that life changed as well.
Abstraction emerged by an international network of artists that were influenced by what each other did. From the impressionists embracing visible brush strokes and plain-air, the fauvists who painted familiar subjects in unfamiliar ways (color & technique). The cubists who started breaking down the subject into geometric shapes from several viewpoints simultaneously. The Futurists added movement and speed depicting overstimulation of urban life. Artists like Kadinsky (whom many credit as the pioneer of abstraction) started to use minimum detail to convey the essence of his subject. He wanted to commune with the spiritual world and described the content of his work as "what the spectator lives or feels while under the effect of the form and color combinations ". While Kadinsky still followed compositional rules, even this disappeared when the colour field painters came onto the scene. These are of course just a few of the movements that deployed abstraction toward innumerable ends.
Forms were seen on its own terms and free from the burden of representing objects and colors there for their own expressive sake. Abstract art can be based on anything; an experience, idea, nature, dreams or nothing at all. Artists believed that without the distraction of subject matter art can interact directly on the soul.
New series ‘pages of my diary’
In my ‘artist story’ I mentioned that the loss of a diary prompted me to the canvas as a teenager. This month I drew inspiration from the movements mentioned above and as my usual work seemed unequipped to express my current state of mind I threw my meticulous planning out of the window and I give way to impulsion. I had no preconceived idea where this series would go or where it would fit into my larger body of work (it doesn’t!). But the impulse was overwhelming and I simply could not bear doing anything else. These are small works with oil on paper similar to the pages of a diary, each the sincerest expression of my state of being for that hour as I rode waves of turmoil and joy. The small scale enabled me to accurately capture the moments before they passed. As the impressionists worked fast to capture light before it changed, I felt like I had to capture a sensation before it passed. It was instinctive and often scary. Working without the safety of a familiar subject I felt lost at times and terrified at others –when a piece begins to come together and carry meaning but not yet complete, it can be destroyed by a single (wrong) stroke (and many, many were). But the few that survived this process will be added to my website this week. They were truthful and sincere while they developed their own voice and identity. When talking about abstraction, art educator Sarah Urist Green said ‘It’s done well and its done poorly’. I really do not know if these were done well or poorly but I know making them were therapeutic and uplifting.
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Also, to give voice to my secret indulgence in abstraction I have started a new Instagram account where these will be featured.
“Everything starts from a dot”
“A line is a dot that goes for a walk”