Part 1
Every year I give something up for my new years resolution, but as 2025 is looming and resolutions are on the horizon, I’ll give something up AND take something up. I’m going to take up abstract painting for 2025.
There’s something wonderfully enjoyable about it, about the process. It’s indulgent - like when you put some paint on a surface simply for the sake of putting that paint on the surface, and then covering it up with another and another…multiple painted layers. It requires one to be wasteful…wasting paint in order to discover some rich quality in the building up of layers that will never be seen… these unseen layers can be felt through the surface though… like the footsteps you heard yourself make yesterday but no longer can be heard today.
Free from form, free from expectation, free from objectification…Abstract painting is freeing. Here you are free to explore the materials without the constraints of drawing something accurately. It’s playful. It awakens the inner child and the wise intellect at the same time. The child plays with the tools and materials, seeing what they do, what one can do with them without direction. The wise intellect makes many decisions where there’s no rules to obey, no boundaries to consider. The intellect makes up the rules and then sticks to them, bends them or breaks them to achieve a good outcome. (“good” is what a ‘wise’ person achieves where possible, methinks.)
In abstract painting I have the opportunity to explore colour, mediums, paint, texture, layering, composition, mixed media materials, recycled supports, taste, style, design, repetition, brushes, mark making, tools and time.
Freed from form, freed from expectations of accurately drawing something representational, all critique becomes subjective.
I don’t know why I like it. Not really. Often I don’t even know what it’s even meant to be.
Everyone sees something different in an abstract painting.
“Murmurations” said Krysh when she looked at this above painting. It reminded her of a flock of starlings as they fly around…changing direction as they do….incredibly not flying into each other and getting tangled up. Echos of movement.
Above is Murmurations 1 and 2, and below is Split System 2. These paintings with the repeated paint strokes were therapeutic to paint…calming. I wonder if a similar feeling of therapeutic calmness affects the viewer when looking at them?
I like these repetitive paint lines and these half circles…”circley squares” we called them in class during the recent abstract project at Splashout art studios.
We have a lot of fun in class.
portrait of a man, 45×45cm