Abstract painting explained – Part 3

To fully appreciate abstract art, you really do need an understanding of what the artist is trying to achieve. With many types of art, you can look at it with no prior knowledge, and can appreciate it for what it is. In some ways, this is true of abstract art, if the shapes and colors are pleasing, but to really gain a full appreciation of it, you need to know a little about the history.

Abstract art has been around ever since man first tried to express himself in form and color. Many of the first paintings are abstract in nature, and in several cultures, representational art is forbidden, so abstract art abounds.

Abstract art can readily be confused with expressionist art. This type of art is produced by artists such as Jackson Pollock. Expressionism is the result of an artist trying to express a thought, idea or emotion on canvas. This is often a very traumatic experience, as the artist feels that there is no other way to express himself, and the paintings reflect this trauma.

Abstract art, however, does not come purely from feelings. Abstract art is an artists representation of a physical form, but he has taken it beyond what he/she sees in front of him.

An artist might look at a landscape and see the colors, shapes and textures before him and decide to produce a purely representational picture. This painting will be true to life and almost photographic in its reality. Another artist might look at the same landscape and see the way the curves of the hills interact with each other, and the way colors flow and repeat themselves. This second artist might produce a painting full of wavy lines and rhythmic color changes, and this is abstract art.

An abstract painting starts with a real concrete form, and then it is abstracted, or taken forward. An artist might take all of the scene before him, or only a piece. He might take the windows of a building and paint them large and multicolored, taking what he sees one step further, bringing the colors in the reflections forward until they dominate the painting.

One of the most famous abstract artists is Piet Mondrian. You might know his paintings as being rigid and for their use of primary colors. You might not know that these paintings are based on landscapes. If you study Mondrian’s work, you will be able to find the scenes that he was representing. Once you see a still life next to a Mondrian interpretation, it all suddenly becomes clear.

So if you want to produce an abstract painting, concentrate on one aspect of the thing you are trying to paint. In a church or cathedral, it might be the repetition of arches and the multitude of shades of gray. If you are looking at a seascape, it might be the horizontal divisions in color between the waves that get you excited. Break things down in to their component parts. Simplify the shapes to take out frills and clutter. Represent buildings are rectangles and bushes as squares, and moves things up and down so that lines coincide eg made the bushes larger so that they are the same height as the house.

If you want to learn about abstract art, there is no substitute for looking at the masters. Read books, use the IMAGES section of search engines, and go to museums and galleries.

Abstract paintings aren’t just random blobs on a canvas. The choice of colors and shapes all have their meaning. Learn the history behind it and you’ll learn to love it.

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.