Future Perfect Now #74
I must stop looking at the efforts of artists on Facebook and the rest of the web, and find my own way. I see now that I have my own path and that, even now, it has yet to be defined. Abstraction is not collage in paint, it is not driven by technique and the collection of colours and shapes purely for the sake of an aesthetic. It is deeper than that. It is an abstraction of an idea, a taking of that idea beyond the obvious a generator of thoughts and a creator of mystery for the mind that must stretch beyond its cage when it is shown a form that has little reference to the base actuality. Richter comes to mind, with is dark, angst-ridden form in the Berkehau series and, later, the tumultuous, explosive imagery based on the 911 event. The work clearly comes from somewhere other than an appealing arrangement of things that get ‘likes’. We are so visually ignorant, I think. The education system of my day never took art seriously, except in a rather stuffy academic way. It never held high the passionate feelings of the individual, bringing them to the fore and celebrating them, rather than boxing and judging whatever they produced. Yet I still see abstraction as a high form of story and revelation that, given some nurturing, belief and self-worth, will generate the art that will be my legacy.
About this image
Driven by social media: oil on canvas
47 x 47 inches
Francis Bacon famously regarded abstract work as 'purely decorative'. That struck home with me, as I have an aversion to 'decorative'. Maybe it's just my ego looking for a deeper meaning in my art, but I think it is more than that. There is so much about the visual world that we don't understand, and there is so much more inside us that we have the potential to express, beyond the confines of rational thought, explanation and justification. So, my abstract work is always an experiment, where I dare to be vulnerable and try to put in visual language, something inexpressible.
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