Blog

            I have been working with abstraction for many decades. Depending on how one thinks about abstract art or abstraction in art, I could say that every artist works abstractly and that every artist works concretely. For ease of discussion, let’s say that we focus on painting. A painting is a concrete, physical object that represents something: an idea, a perception, a picture, an image, a symbol, a metaphor, or various combinations of these concepts. Over many years, my thinking about abstraction has narrowed and expanded simultaneously. As an artist, I spend more time thinking about art – its purpose, its meaning, its importance, its necessity, its history, its source – more than I spend actually making it. This is what I do as an artist, for without that thinking and contemplation, I would have little reason to make art, or whatever I did make might not be called art. It certainly would not have the same creative well from which to draw.

            When most artists learn their craft, at some point they learn basic principles about design, expression, and pictorial possibilities. Those principles are abstract ideas that can be interpreted in varieties of ways. Even the briefest look at artistic samples from generations past will illustrate the incredible variety of interpretations of those basic ideas. The visual alphabet may be the same, but the visual words and sentences made from them are unique to individual artists (except when an artist may copy another, but then that copyist is likely not considered an artist). The point, though, is that artists are working with a similar set of principles (abstract ideas) that underlie any resultant art. A representational painter who makes paintings based on observed reality is using the same principles as an abstract painter who is not working from anything seen in the external world. Both artists are concerned about color, shape, form, texture, and other visual tools, but what they do with those tools diverges greatly from the other.

            My concerns with abstraction are discovering and exploring congruent elements in work dating back to my earliest dabbling in art. I have discovered a range of design elements in many early works that have continued to evolve through years of expression. One of these is diagonal movement within the picture space. In landscape paintings this may have appeared as the line of a road moving into the distance, a fenceline moving from foreground to background, a line of trees, receding telephone poles or houses, or other linear perspective examples. Brushwork freed from the confines of recognizable shapes has taken on meaning as visual handwriting and expressive gestures that for me embody energy and whimsy. The rectilinear shapes and parallel planes of my Window and Doors series have taken on curvilinear sides and diagonal movement across and into the picture space that create multilayered tension much like that seen in some early cubism.

             Compositions are found within linear gestures that intertwine and overlap, and from these a design emerges as shapes begin to reveal themselves in blocked areas of color. Sometimes I will see bird-like or fish-like shapes that I may enhance or disguise as part of a symbolic image or set of images that also suggest a title in line with natural or spiritual thoughts and feelings. Memories and dreams are also conjured by some of these spontaneous expressions. Overall, the process feels intuitive, abstract in that there is no observed subject, and improvisational as there is no intentional concept to be illustrated. What is of particular interest to me, however, is the growing body of interrelated images that emerge from painting to painting.