Understanding abstract art – Part 12

To understand abstract art, one must have a piece that is trying to say something in the first place. In modern abstracts, many times the meaning of the piece is lost in the creation, or worse yet an artist becomes so abstract that the meaning makes no sense at all. Smearing paint on a canvas or applying random pieces of found objects together and calling it “The Political Views of the American Minority Underground” might be a hard one for people to sit and figure out. There has to be some responsibility on the part of the artist to make the viewer FEEL something. This is the job of the artist, and this job is made even more clear when the artist produces abstracts. Because, by definition, an abstract has no clear form, or image to portray what it is trying to say, in many ways the abstract arts are among the most difficult to do well. An artist must generate a visual image that a person does not recognize as anything that would relate to real life, and then the artist must somehow draw an emotion from the viewer, even though the viewer may not relate to the image directly.

Now on the part of the viewer, the understanding comes from not a mental, logical space, but from feelings invoked by the artist’s use of color, positioning, brush strokes, and movement on the canvas or sculpture. This is where a lot of people that are attempting to understand abstracts get lost. Many times a viewer will try to “take the art apart” mentally, and then they will often get lost in over thinking a piece.

If both artist and viewer can keep it simple, rely on feeling, and try to invoke an emotion, then the understanding of abstract art will be much easier, and more meaningful.