What's Up With the Abstract Stuff?
My first abstract painting
oil on canvas 24 x 24 in.
I made my first attempt at an abstract painting in 2013. That's a picture of it there. I was a little burned out and needed to try something different. The spark came from watching some art history documentaries on the Khan Academy website. one of the best sites on the Internet, by the way, in terms of influencing mankind to improve in general.
I knew plenty about abstract and the people who developed it early on. I never thought I would try it because I thought it was way over my head. I had no understanding of what the process was mentally or conceptually. Where do you start? What is the order of progression? Still life painting, on the other hand, has a formal process to it, to say the least. Abstract does not. There is no single technique or style. It was totally esoteric to me. Working without a subject to show me what to do was totally foreign to my mind. Abstract is so different that it’s like going from painting to foosball, for instance. To me it was like a completely different medium and discipline altogether. And it really is, except for one thing: the paint. That stuff is the same and it is mesmerizing and hypnotic.
Mixing colors with high quality oil paint is almost a spiritual experience at times. I mix everything from the three primaries cyan, magenta, and yellow. I have always been mesmerized by the beauty of the colors mixing together. There have been countless times that I wished I could stop mixing and declare my pallet a finished piece of art because this paint was just such beautiful stuff. All the inspiration was right under my nose for years and I had no idea.
Seated Women, 1937
Picasso
It was the abstract expressionist painters from the 1940's and 50's that got the ball rolling for me of course. They are the ones that took painting all the way out there. It took roughly 400 years for impressionism, the first big development that changed painting. Then it took 40 years to cubism, then 40 after that, the final step for painting, Abstract Expressionism, and it’s done. The entire modern development of painting was finished. The edge of every direction had been explored, studied, debated, until it was so high into the stratosphere that the average citizen had no idea what was going on. But that’s okay. They have TV to keep them docile now.
Ironically the final stage of paintings' developement ended more in the style of the fauves. I think it was an accident that modern art ended up ending with a style that favored beauty once again. I think that might be because this paint is just so damn beautiful! Everyone followed cubism and laughed off the fauves. Everyone that is, accept Picasso. Look at his later work. I think he was spending too much time with Matisse. I think he quietly settled down and out came the beauty once again. He was pretty pissed about something in his younger days, but he got over it and quietly joined the fauves. Look at Seated Women down there, 1937. Very upbeat bright colors. Lots of curved lines, nothing to get your anxiety going there at all I don’t think. You might even say this is a fauve cubist painting. It looks like both to me. Matisse was clearly getting into his head. Messed him all up.
Lavender Mist, or originally, Number 1 was created in 1950 and it is almost ten feet wide. No lavender by the way.
But back to the topic, the New York guys were talking all about the quest for a more pure art form, a more pure form of painting. They wanted the painting to be untainted by any other kind of art. Subject matter had to be expelled because when you identify something your mind begins to describe it using words. This is a narative and therefore a form a literature, thus the painting is rendered impure. You must create a painting that does not envoke the minds natural desire to describe it with words. Indeed it is pretty tough to put an acurate image of a Jackson Pollock in someones head by describing it if they have never seen his work before. You can describe how he did it, but the person will never end up realizing what it looks like unless they see it themselves. It can not even be sketched. Those huge canvases are an experience that even a photo can not truly convey the feeling of standing in front of one.
TO BE CONTINUED....