Abstract painting explained – Part 9

An abstract painting cannot be explained – nor understood. Rather it should be experienced. An artist friend, now departed, once said: ” I do not explain and I do not complain.” During the days of ‘Martial Law’ in the Philippines – in the so called Marcos era, art materials, being mostly imported, were really hard to come by. They were rare and expensive. As an avant-garde group, we staged exhibitions in the Installation Format using what we termed then as ‘Indigenous Materials:’ twigs, leaves, stones and soil. We were ecology conscious so we did not cut down trees or chop off their branches. There were abundant materials to be found even in nature’s debris.

As for myself, I combined those natural things with industrial detritus. In one of those ‘Site-works’ exhibitions, while the rest of us toiled on our individual contributions to the group show, this friend of mine asked another artist who was constructing an edifice-like structure from bamboo for a piece of his discarded split bamboo, painted it green and suspended it in mid-air with a fishing nylon from the ceiling. When asked to explain his piece of work, he simply stated that it gave him the same amount of pleasure to conceptualize his suspended piece of split bamboo as the other artists were having with their complicated structures.

All said and done, the exhibit was a blast. Nothing was sold of course – all those ephemeral stuff – a circle made up of red flower petals, a couple of rows of soil imprinted with tire tracks and a charcoal drawing of a passenger jeepney on the white wall where the tracks ended. My own contribution of a steel bed with its mattress of dried leaves and beside it, a telephone tied down with vines atop a piece of rock . All of them may seem like gibberish nonsense if one has to search for meanings typical of left-brain logic. But as an artistic experience, they created a beautiful dream-like atmosphere wherein efforts to define or explain it seems to be totally out of place. Most of the pieces in this art exhibition cannot be described as anything but abstract art in its totality since none of the pieces attempted to represent anything else other than itself.

An abstract painting does not try to mimic nature or any tangible object in the ‘outer’ world but remains pure painting as such, because it expresses its own essence as an object made out of paint on canvas stretched over an scaffolding of wood that has the capacity to move us emotionally or cerebrally because of the array of colors, shapes, lines, textures, techniques and other methods by which they arrived upon the canvas surface and set the mood by which we subjectively receive the message or non-message that they impart. The usual cliche expression that even a chimp or a toddler can make an abstract painting cannot hold water when we talk about a geometrical abstract composition by Piet Mondrian or Frank Stella. A two year old toddler featured in the Saatchi Website News does not discredit Expressionalist abstraction but merely reveals to us a talented prodigy. I know of an adult painter who can create childlike abstract paintings. Very rarely do we witness such a talent for the capacity to re-capture the innocence and spontaneity of a child in an adult artist.

Trying to explain abstract art is out of sync with appreciating it. It’s something like explaining the logic behind the symbols in a dream. Instead of doing this, we can just sit back and experience the art for all the pleasures or the pain that it conjures up within us.