My experimentation with cold wax as a painting medium is a push-pull between exploring the materials and exploring abstraction. When I let myself focus on the materials, I automatically create abstract pieces. When I try to control my composition and create “pictures”, I lose the beauty of the materials and of the abstraction.
This is an old story. Ever since I began painting in 1998, I have struggled with a pull toward abstraction. In learning “how” to paint, I learned the rules of representation: shape, shadow, perspective, and so on. By following the rules, I turned out quite respectable paintings. People responded well to them, and my teachers approved. But it was not my voice that was speaking.
My voice seems to be abstract. But the rules of abstraction seem more to be basic guidelines, beyond which you are on your own (but isn't that part of the freedom?). I have always worried that my abstract pieces weren’t real “art” but rather amateurish play. Perhaps, like its rules, the criteria for judging abstract art are vague. This route, for me, is a paradox: it is easy because I just speak with my voice. But, because there are no rules, it is hard to know if what I am creating is worthwhile.
2 comments:
The blog is off to a great start. I had a similar conversation to what you bring up the other day with a landscape painter who wants to move into abstraction. It takes a long time to find an authentic abstract language, and my best advice is just let it unfold and not over-think too much--just be open to things, observe, and then let go. I went back and forth between landscape and abstraction for a long time myself, and one does feed the other.
You can trust the intuitive and plenty of artists with university degrees are doing just that!
I just subscribed to your blog and look forward to seemwhat you will be writing about--
Rebecca
So much I can relate to the above. The abstraction of reality is what I see in what I try to create. Basic representation has rules that in a word bore me. Not out of fear of ability or some such. Along with Ciel Bergman and Crowell above you voicing and travelling a fantastic path.
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