Abstraction

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What is abstraction?
Abstraction has a spectrum. Ultimately, it is a balance of and play of shapes on the paper. Sometimes you may recognize the content, yet it is abstracted. For me, it is important to recognize what the subject is even if it is heavily abstracted. I may approach a painting on the wall not knowing what it is of, but I might be drawn to how the shapes are interacting, and perhaps a strong value study underneath. And then the forms merge and separate, and I can recognize something of what I am familiar with. Those few moments between the "pleasing play of just shapes" and recognition of content are very exciting and can never be unlearned. That slow reveal is so important for me. That is when the painting emerges for me. I started painting impressionistically and have been doing so for the last three years. Only now am I trying to abstract what I see. I don’t quite have a narrative for everything that I choose to paint yet, but I think over time as I decide what to abstract and what to leave real, that narrative will emerge. Just like style. Right now I am just painting.

Jean Warren’s workshop really opened my eyes to abstraction and some of her paintings clearly show the slow reveal, and the content of what I’m looking at, but it is heavily abstracted with beautiful transparent color. George James, Frank Webb, and Polly Hammett may all start with a realistic subject, but abstract the final work so that it cannot be called impressionistic. THAT is where I want to be....somewhere in the middle. I just found John Salminen's (whom I do not consider an abstractionist - not in the least!) Abstraction DVD and it is opening my eyes to how something can be abstracted (though in his case, the final demo painting showed no signs of the original subject - so there is no slow reveal).

This is Ardenwood Historic Farm's Patterson's House which I went all the way to paint last Thursday for the SCVWS paintsite. By zooming in, I have abstracted the subject but it is still only a zoomed-in version of impressionistically-painted architecture. Unfortunately, the aspect ratio of the pencil study and the final painting do not match - such a basic error. You can clearly see that the final painting has a large white field on the right where nothing seems to be happening - because nothing is! That is not a problem in the pencil study. It can be rectified by cropping the final painting, but it just goes to show that the whole point of a preliminary sketch/study is to work out problems of this kind, not to thoughtlessly introduce them later!





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