Well February is behind us and it looks like I've averaged an hour per day on making art, though not necessarily on what I had expected. This last month I worked a lot on a new kind of abstract art for me. Most of my abstracts in the past have been along the lines of Austin - symmetrical, repeating shapes with bold outlines. This month I've wanted to try my hand at the more conventional style of abstract - paint splattered on a page, with varying textures, colours blending into pleasing combinations, and other mediums creating different types of line and shape. In future, I''d like to be able to blend this type of abstract with my own pattern making style in order to create something new and hopefully interesting.
One thing I've learned about this is that creating a simple looking abstract is, in fact, super hard. There are particular types of marks that I want to make but I'm not really sure how. Sometimes things don't go according to plan and you cover up part of a layer that you intended to keep. It's harder to create a balanced composition when it isn't symmetrical. And for me, it's really very difficult to keep spaces blank as well as busy, complicated areas. Blank spaces look like they need to be filled before they're finished. I need to cut that out, because leaving blanks can lead to a more sophisticated looking image.
I started thinking about this style of loose, painterly abstract because of something I posted during Leslie Saeta's 30 Paintings in 30 Days challenge back in January. One of the artworks I posted, Bethany, seemed to garner quite a bit of attention. That image received more pageviews than any other artwork that I posted to the 30 in 30 blog. I thought this was interesting, for something which had been intended mostly as a place holder, some filler art. I had worked on something else that day which had not succeeded, so plonked my remaining paint on a piece of paper in the hopes of creating a nice background for some future art and called it a day. I hadn't thought it would appear to be interesting to anyone as a standalone piece of art.
I think it's important for this reason not to write off anything you create just because it isn't particularly to your own taste. We all enjoy different things, and your favourite piece of your own art and someone else's might be very different. Since looking into the subject, I've found quite a few abstract artworks that I'm quite enamored with. It's all about finding the examples that appeal to you and figuring out why they appeal more than others.
Unfortunately, I seem to create the best abstracts by accident. Anything I try to do deliberately doesn't seem to come out as visually interesting to me as a random splodge on a piece of scrap paper. My paint palette is fascinating to me, even if the canvas I've spent a couple of hours on isn't. I need to find a way now to trick myself into creating some beautiful art.
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| "Cacophony", Painterly Abstract in Acrylic Paint on Paper |
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