williambootartist.com
  • Home
  • Welcome
    • Profile >
      • CV
      • Statement
      • Method
  • Blog
  • Store
    • Commissions
  • Geometry
    • Geometry In Art
    • Geometric Abstraction
    • Geometric Abstract Artist Index
  • Finland 2018
  • Melbourne 2017 - 18
    • Melbourne 2016
  • Finland 2015
    • USA Iowa 2014 >
      • G2A Denmark 2014 >
        • G2 Melbourne 2013
        • G3 Melbourne 2012 - 13
        • G4 Seoul/Melb 2009 - 10
        • G5 Melbourne 2007
        • G6 Melbourne 2007
        • G7 Melbourne 2007
        • G8 Korea 2006
        • G9 Korea 2005
        • G10 Korea 2005
        • G11 Korea 2004
  • G12 Korea 2003
    • G13 Korea 2003
    • G14 Melbourne 2000-2
    • G15 Melbourne 2000
    • G16 Melbourne 2000-1
    • G17 Melbourne 2000
    • G18 Melbourne 2000
    • G19 Hobart 98-99
    • G20 Lismore 96-97
    • G21 Lismore 96-97
  • Stephanie Kim
  • Design
  • Drawings
  • Words
    • Essay 1
    • Essay 2
    • Essay 3
    • Essay 4
    • Essay 5
    • Essay 6
    • Essay 7
    • Essay 8
    • Other Writers >
      • OW 2
      • OW 3
      • OW4
  • Contact
  • Projects
  • News

Painting Abstract Realities

2/11/2014

0 Comments

 

From Concrete to Abstract and Back Again

PicturePainting 05 - 1963 - John McCracken
What causes artists to copy or mimic their environment or conversely make strange worlds out of what is unseen? Much has been written about why different artists have created art in the manner in which they have done over the course of history. It is hard to dispute the archaeological evidence that art was originally created as an integral part of the worship of a deity or deities for many primitive or pre modern people groups and this should not be ignored. 

When the making of art was separated from its sacred function by industrial societies and "free" artists, we saw the rise of secular thinking and different understandings of what art is and what its function should be. With spiritual societies we see art depicting unseen abstract entities and concepts usually within a framework of mythologies. With the advent of secularism and the decline of the church in the West we witness the attempt to avoid the abstract with strict adherence to the "real" or what is seen! The advance of technology and the separation from nature and the land witnesses a return to abstraction in the 20th century as artists begin to yearn for a return to a more fundamental life with deeper meaning. 

This migration between what is "seen" and "unseen" is no accident as artists in the process of making, attune themselves to deeper, inner realities and feelings. These "feelings" can only be expressed by the idiosyncratic use of colour, line, texture and form. Here i would postulate that if there is no other reality than what can be seen, tasted or felt in the here and now then the "process" of "making" becomes vital to "being." This is echoed in the words of Barnett Newman when he said "we are making it out of ourselves," in other words, the outer cathedrals of worship aren't valid anymore so we are constructing "inner secular cathedrals" in order to find a new way or purpose in art and life. The making of art then becomes an attempt to make something new out of the "self." This is a major leap from previous artists who for the most part painted representations of mythological characters, stories from the Bible or genre scenes and portraits. The exception here is probably Islamic culture where figuration was forbidden and was replaced with intricate pattern systems particularly in and on mosques.

Picture
Who's Afraid Of Red, Yellow and Blue 4 - 1969-70 - Barnett Newman
PictureCurrent - 1964 - Bridget Riley
So what happens when an artist makes art and in particular abstract art? How does any artist proceed with the "making" from start to finish? One of my favourite books, "Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of The Worlds Most Creative People" by Robert S and Michele M Root-Bernstein details thirteen ways that creative people learn and utilise in their attempts to find/create new ideas or inventions. Whether the intention is towards the sacred or secular, from the outset, most creative people work through stages of understanding/knowing from imitation to innovation, gradually employing more and more of these thinking strategies. Recognising and skilfully applying observation, imaging, abstraction, recognition of patterns, formation of patterns, analogies, body thinking, empathy, dimensional thinking, modelling, play, transformation and synthesis, enables the artist to see the unseen and discover novel solutions to problems. Understanding the relationships or connections between concrete and abstract ideas or things is a prerequisite to invention. Those who take the time to learn these connections and apply the thirteen tools will find new possibilities in whatever field they may be working in.

PictureBlack Iris - 1906 - Georgia O'Keefe
The see-saw swing between the concrete and the abstract can be witnessed in various forms across time as artists struggled to find their own voice. The thirteen tools have facilitated that creative to-ing and fro-ing, empowering artists to reach heights of excellence in creative expression. Painter Bridget Riley describes her paintings as “intimate dialogue(s) between my total being and the visual agents which constitute the medium … I have tried to realize visual and emotional energies simultaneously from the medium. My paintings are, of course, concerned with generating visual sensations, but certainly not to the exclusion of emotion. One of my aims is that these two responses shall be experienced as one and the same." Riley has an intimate grasp of these thinking strategies and uses them to achieve her aims of bringing visual sensation and emotions together in the viewer's mind.

Georgia O’Keeffe wrote, “I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at - not copy it.” She understood that through careful observation in order to get close to what she was trying to paint she had to re-invent what she saw and that would result in a "translation" of her subject not a copy of it. Her work skirted close to the edges of abstraction as she developed her own painting "voice." 


Even the poet E. E. Cummings, wrote, “the artist, is not a man who describes but a man who FEELS.” He was quick to dismiss the idea that writers are just wordsmiths manipulating syntax and grammar. The feeling of the artist hunts for an avenue of expression via the mind using the creative thinking tools. The process might go either way, concrete to abstract or vice versa. The important thing is that the artist is able to bring into the world new "things" that open up new "perspectives" whether by poem, painting or other means through often very "abstract" feelings.

What is the future of abstraction? Abstract art has been mainstream now for over 100 years and is accepted by larger and more diverse audiences than ever. There are still detractors who attempt to marginalise art that requires thought but the public is increasingly more aware that abstraction is the difficult but necessary twin of figurative art. For me, abstraction is the key to an open horizon because this kind of thinking underpins the "obvious" or what is easily "seen." 

I'm inspired by artists that find their way through the maze of creative possibilities and then go on to do amazing things in the field of abstraction. Whether dealing from a sacred or secular viewpoint abstract thinking opens up a plethora of creative possibilities!  
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    View my profile on LinkedIn

    William M Boot

    An eclectic compendium of artistic and philosophical musings on ideas that have fired my imagination and inspiration over many years.

    Archives

    December 2018
    November 2016
    October 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014

    Art Blogs

    Abcrit

    Painters Table 

    Huffington Post Art

    Daily Art Fixx

    Paint Later

    Contemporary Art Daily

    Christopher Volpe's Art Blog

    Chris McAuliffe Art Writing

    Hyperallergic

    Joanne Mattera Art Blog

    Encaustic Art Blog Roll

    The Art Newspaper

    I Like This Art

    ​Contemporary Art Blogs
    ​

    Encaustic Art Blogs
    All Things Encaustic
    Joanne Mattera Art Blog
    Encaustic Links Page

    Art Articles

    Anish Kapoor Coats Cloud Gate In the "Darkest" Black Known to Humanity

    Jasper Johns:Monotypes 

    Robert Ryman: Double Positive

    ​Clifford Still's Radical Repetitions

    Giorgio Morandi: Peculiar Realist

    Giorgio Morandi - Metaphysician of Bologna

    ​Alberto Burri's Challenge

    I Will Not Be A Sunday Painter: Alberto Burri Makes a Picture in 1954

    Jackson Pollock - Tate Liverpool

    Painting and Reality: Art as Analogy

    Real painting - Exhibition Review

    Gerhard Richter Interview: Abstract Paintings

    Abstract Painting: Social Function

    Abstract Painting: Everything is Finished, Nothing is Dead

    Cy Twombly Drawings

    Realizing Clifford Still

    Cy Twombly Interview

    The Cult of Jeff Koons

    Modern Art Was a CIA Weapon

    Agnes Martin - Two Books - A Life

    Agnes Martin - An Existential Shudder From a Pure White Surface

    Agnes Martin - Tate Exhibition

    Agnes Martin - Interview

    The Abstract Sublime in Contemporary Art: Robert Rosenblum

    Nicholas De Stael - Needs To Be Seen

    Donald Judd and Frank Stella Interview - What You See Is What You See

    Imi Knoebel - Interview

    Imi Knoebel - Dia 2009

    Fantasies Artists Have About Success

    Damien Hirst - Plagiarist Extraordinaire - Learn the Truth

    Bridget Riley - Exhibition Review

    Vincent Longo: Interview 2016

    ​Philip Guston:Flesh and Bones and 'Thingness'

    ​
    Luc Tuymans: Interview with Jarrett Earnest

    ​Luc Tuymans: "On the Image" essay

    ​Luc Tuymans: "Le Meprise" Exhibition at David Zwirner Galleries, NYC, 2016

    ​Lloyd Rees: The Final Interview with Janet Hawley

    ​Richard Pousette-Dart:
    Exhibition Review- Pace NYC