Jackson Pollock: Number 8 (detail)
Scan by Mark Harden
Abstract Paintings: Try One, They're Good for You
If you've never tried to paint an abstract painting: Now is the time. You'll learn a lot and have fun! Don't worry, no-one need ever find out your guilty secret...
Most of the people who view this site will be representational painters, like myself. We paint what we see. For many of us, abstract painting is a no-no and we tend to view abstract artists with suspicion. Ditto conceptual artists, video artists and installation artists.
I love the way great representational paintings create visual richness and a sense of space. I love the human emotions that representational paintings can convey - and I often fail to find these qualities in abstract art (but then again, I often fail to find these qualities in representational paintings too).
But that doesn't mean that we can't learn important and valuable lessons from abstract art (or even conceptual art, or video installations).
As artists, it is important that learn to cope with abstraction. My advice is: Don't knock it, learn from it and use it! And the best way to learn from it is to copy it or create it yourself.
Copying or creating your own abstract painting will:
Open your eyes to the abstraction around you. Clouds, the fine mottling of skin, leaf litter in a forest, waves on the beach, crumbling cliffs - all contain abstract elements. Unless you want to paint every leaf, pebble or water droplet you will need to introduce a level of abstraction into your work.
Teach you more about paint. Abstract art encourages us to look at the qualities of texture and colour provided by the paint in its pure form. There is nothing else to distract our senses. Painting a picture of a beautiful person is too distracting to allow us to enjoy the subtleties of paint, colour and texture (or it should be if you're doing it right).
Help your composition. You'll learn how colours react when they're next to each other and where to place colours to achieve a balanced picture.
Teach you about colour mixes. Do you ever mix a wonderful colour, then wonder what you can do with it? Mix up a vat of the colour, find some colours that harmonise or contrast with it and splash it on. Sounds like fun, but you'll be learning too.
Improve your textures. Few of us apply flat areas of colour. We apply paint in all kinds of ways to achieve different effects. Thin scumbles, thick impasto, transparent glazes. Use your abstracts as a testing ground for these techniques.
Remember: You are already an abstract artist. Perhaps you think you've never painted an abstract painting in your life? Well, have a look at the sky you painted last week, or the flowery meadow you painted on holiday. Unless you've painted every leaf and cloudlet, you will have simplified, scumbled, rubbed out and glazed some lovely little areas of abstraction. We create these areas in our paintings all the time. Then we legitimise them by surrounding them by more realistically painted objects.