Without any formal art education, I tend to come on new artists by chance or recommendation or perhaps from the media. Accordingly my knowledge of art and artists is patchy and variable. As an example I recently watched a documentary on TV about the artist Joan Mitchell, who was at the time unknown to me. Stimulated by that I have been looking, on the net only alas, at some of the work of her contemporaries. Like most people with a passing interest in the subject I knew of Pollock and Rothko, but beyond that people like Mitchell and de Kooning had passed me by.
One of the things that fascinates me about abstract art is the way in which a seemingly arbitrary arrangement of blocks of colour on a flat surface can still evoke a sense of 3D space. I found this in much of de Kooning's work. As an example, looking through a book about him, I came on two pictures - 'Palisade' from 1957 and 'September Morn' from 1958, both of which immediately made me think of the work of the Victorian artist John Martin, whose work I saw recently at the Tate Gallery in London. They had strong resonances with Martin's vast, storm swept landscapes, usually with a tiny human figure somewhere in the scene.
Similarly, 'Montauk Highway' conjures up a strong sense of movement through space which was apparent without knowing the title.
For me this goes to the point of my previous post about the difference between abstraction and abstract. De Kooning's paintings are fully abstract but still refer to and draw on landscape and 'real' space in their organisation and composition.
Edit: This is post 100 on this blog, which at one stage I thought I would never meet. To celebrate I am offering 10% of the first 10 orders from the shop received before the end of April. I'm going to be adding some new small prints in a day or so, so keep checking.
Howard Hodgkin is on record as saying that he has never painted an abstract in his life. This may seem surprising when when one looks at his work, but is explained by the fact that for Hodgkin all his work is about something specific - a place, an event or a person. Other abstract painters do not make this sort of claim, but nevertheless often seem to reference the world at large. Arshile Gorky's work for example often seems to include substantial figurative elements.
Joan Mitchell's paintings on the other hand have a strong landscape feel.
Despite these references, I still have problems when I see work being sold on Etsy or EBay described as 'abstract landscape'. This seems to me to be an oxymoron, but not one that is especially helpful. By definition surely, an abstract cannot simultaneously be a landscape. An abstract may reference landscape, but as a painting it cannot be both.
I think the use of these two terms in conjunction arises because of a confusion between the object - an abstract painting is after all an object - and the process of making it, the process of abstraction. It may be the writer in me, but I don't think this is mere wordplay. Too much of contemporary art is seen as at best remote from reality and at worst as meaningless and pretentious. Clarity of language is one way to challenge that view.
Things are still a bit disrupted, with my PC temporarily set up in my studio, because I'm busy laying floors at the moment in the office. To keep things going here are some examples of older work via Flickr.
These are photographs I took of Pagham Harbour near Chichester. I had hopes of using these images as the source material for some prints - it hasn't happened yet - so I was intrigued to see Tina Mammoser's take on the same location. Her work often looks abstracted even though it is inspired by real places, but this image looks pretty specific to me.
On a different tack, the screen prints I was working on have been abandoned for now. My usual problem of overworking has left them a bit of a cluttered mess. Still, lessons learned and I have high hopes for the restarted piece.
A wonderful photograph by the great Antarctic photographer Herbert Ponting
From a set of photographs on Flickr provided by the National Library of NZ, as part of the Flickr Commons
This post is the first in a blow by blow account of work on a new screen print I am making. It may be tempting fate to write about a print that isn't finished yet, but one of the aims of this blog is to write about my own development as an artist. It my be a cliche, but we learn from our mistakes as much as from our successes. So, here goes...
The idea for this print has been around for a while. I discovered, by chance, on Flickr some images of neolithic rock art on Fylingdale moor in North Yorkshire and went on to discover many more. The picture below gives a good indication of how these ancient carvings often sit in a dramatic landscape.
Reading a bit more on the internet I discovered that the rock art of the North of England is, to us anyway, almost entirely abstract. (This web site is a good starting place, as are the books by Stan Beckensall, such as Prehistoric Rock Art of Northumberland. )
Living as I do near the World Heritage monuments of Avebury and Stonehenge, these had inevitably crept into my work. This for example was one of the first collagraph prints I ever made.
This isn't in the shop yet, so the link is to Flickr, but an example soon will be.
Given my existing interest in the period, in landscape and in abstract art, it isn't surprising that I started using some of these images in my prints.
This small embellished monoprint actually predates my conscious discovery of this ancient art form, but some of the forms used - spirals, circles etc are probably deeply rooted in our psychology.
Inspired by the images I found, by the websites and by other books (this one - Ancient British Rock Art: A Guide to Indigenous Stone Carvings
The next step was to make some digital prints using these sketches as a basis, but that will be covered in part 2.
