Abstract painting explained – Part 7
December 25, 2009 by Portrait Painter
Filed under Abstract & Cubism
I love art museums. I never get enough time in one. And I am not an artist, by any means. Now, my daughter is an incredible artist, but me, nah. But there are moments in an art museum that drive me berserk. There I am, in the middle on one of those benches just enjoying some work on the wall at an appropriate distance, getting to know it, become comfortable with it, let it soak into me. All of a sudden some biddies come by and, with arms akimbo, one of them states in a grating third-grade grammar teacher voice, “My five-year old can paint better than that.”
Well, let me vociferously and categorically and politely contradict that thought. Your five-year old most certainly could NOT paint anything even remotely close to that. Yes, to you it may appear random and meaningless and senseless, but it is assuredly not. Let me explain.
Abstract art flies in the face of expectation. But it satisfies the goals of art in an almost metaphysical and visceral level. Abstract art is more pure and fundamental than any other kind of art, for it is truly art for arts sake.
There are basically three kinds of painting: decorative, functional and abstract. Decorative art is meant to be pretty. It exists for the purpose of making a beautiful space. It has to have meaning, it is about something. It works because it plays with that part of the mind that connects it to other images and memories. Functional art exists for a purpose. It is didactic, it tells a story that is instructive and moral (in the plain meaning of the word, not its connotation of virtuous). Now abstract art exists because the artist creates. It does not mean anything. It explores, punctuates and even violates standards of beauty. It is not instructive, and it certainly has not gotten to a point. It IS. Now some abstract art is decorative. I think Kandinsky, for instance, often produces things that are quite pretty, and Pollock sometimes creates canvases that are startling. But in general, the abstract artist does not approach the work of creation by thinking of being pretty.
Here’s a definition of art that includes the abstract, and may help you understand what abstract art is attempting to do. A painting is art when it exists in that state that anything added to it, or taken away from it, would result in it being less perfect. A Jackson Pollack painting may appear to be random, but it is not. Anything added to it, even a single additional spittle of cerise would ruin it.
The Abstract Art of Kazimir Malevich – Expressionist Abstract Artist
November 15, 2009 by Portrait Painter
Filed under Abstract & Cubism
Kazimir Malevich was an art theoretician and designer is considered to be one of the 20th century’s most influential artists. He is regarded as the originator of Suprematism – a Russian abstract art movement that was characterized by the use of just a small number of colours and a few fundamental geometric shapes. Suprematism focused on pure form and its spiritual qualities. Malevich was one of the Russian avant-garde movement’s most prominent members. He was also a pioneer of geometric abstract art.
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was born near Kiev of Polish parents on the 11th of February 1878 and was the eldest of fourteen children. Malevich’s father was an expert in sugar beet processing machinery. The family had to move frequently as sugar beet processing plants were generally built far away from big cities. Malevich’s formal education was only rudimentary. At the age of fifteen he got his first paints and started painting. He took up studies at the Kiev School of Art in 1895.
While living in Kursk Malevich painted his earliest landscapes. In 1903 he joined the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. The early years of Malevich’s career were characterized by his participation in various avant-garde exhibitions. At the Donkey’s Tail exhibition in 1912, he exhibited his Primitivist depictions of peasants.
It was in 1913 that Malevich began painting in the abstract art style which he named Suprematism, making abstract geometric patterns in the process. That same year, he had created the first ever suprematist painting – ‘Black Square on White’ which in his words conveyed “the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art”. Only two years earlier, he had painted ‘Morning in the Country’ in a cubic abstract art style with cylindrical shapes of peasants being a prominent part of this painting.
1913 was also the year when Malevich was swayed by the way Mikhail Larionov interpreted futurism, an important abstract art movement, resulting in works such as ‘Woodcutter’, ‘Peasant Woman with Buckets’, and ‘Morning after a Snowstorm in a Village’. These works incorporated shapes that looked as though they were enveloped in metal. Malevich designed the costumes and sets of the first Futurist opera – Victory over the Sun. At an exhibition held in 1915 in Petrograd, Malevich exhibited his geometric non-objective Suprematist paintings. After a sequence of White on White paintings in 1918, Malevich practically withdrew from abstract art painting and devoted more time to teaching and writing. He also created three-dimensional models that played a significant role in the development of Constructivism.
The year 1919 saw Malevich investigating how Suprematism could be applied in a three-dimensional way in architectural models. In 1922 he went to Leningrad where he was to remain for the final years of his life. He was given a solo exhibition in Moscow in 1929 in the Tretiakov gallery. Malevich used the representational painting style in the works he created during his last period. He passed away on May 15, 1935, a victim of cancer. The coffin he was buried in was one which Malevich himself had adorned with suprematist patterns.