Design- vs. content-driven

I've found that strong design-driven art is more attractive to me than content-driven paintings. Of course, the content or subject is there (unless it is truly non-representational work), but it is realized and recognized a split second after one has responded to the design. For this reason, subjects that lend themselves to being more easily abstracted - interiors, close-ups of anything, still life cropped just so - are more appealing than standard impressionistic distant landscapes where the shapes themselves tell you sky-earth-mountains-lake. A landscape can also be abstracted but I feel there is more effort in hiding or veiling landscape features for the slow reveal to happen.

I've been working on this still life, and just starting with a notan helped me understand and crop shapes right away. Pushing some of the lighter shapes to the white of the paper helps with abstraction. Like a chess board where each shape is bordered by a contrasting value shape, or the way we typically think of the English language's spelling structure (consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel, etc. and playing a lot of online Scrabble has taught me that upsetting this pattern prevents opponents from being able to stack on the word!), if each shape is bordered by a contrasting value (regardless of resource), and that in turn determines the value of the next, it can often yield a surprising array of shapes presenting a beautifully abstracted work which provides a slow reveal of the subject which is inherently recognizable. I've just discovered Mark Folly who does gorgeous watercolors of abstracted interiors - so much to learn! Now interiors are starting to fascinate me - there is so much scope of abstraction with geometric shapes, combining them, separating them....it's incredible how little you need to define something and still retain its meaning and recognizability. Edges is a whole another topic....