Abstract art was once the bad boy of the art world. The juvenile delinquent of art history.
It had rebellious, drunken outcast revolutionary origins. It no longer has the same growl or bite,
Nobody runs screaming out of a gallery, horrified, when faced with an abstract painting as once they did.
These days, most abstract art is far from earth shattering and is actually rather mainstream.
I am a painter who is attracted to the more nonconformist, rebellious kind of explorations.
I love art that challenges the viewer, confronts the status quo. Breaks the mold.
I am still unable to completely abandon myself to pure abstract expression as much as I want to.
I continue to employ foundational ideas, such as minimalism and colour field abstraction–ideas grounded in principles of composition and a philosophy of art. I like a certain kind of orderliness to things even if they appear to be random. I am still obsessed with beauty of form.
I am longing to paint from a more rebellious and unruly part of myself and when I do I feel excited about the work– but I don’t often show that work.
I’m not quite ready. I think it’s because I don’t yet truly trust or love the result. I love the process. I love the feelings in the process. I love the freedom in the process– but the results bewilder me somehow and I am not yet sure of myself–as in not sure that the whole exercise is not just a performance of someone I want to be rather than expressing from who I really am.
I do believe however very strongly in the idea that we are more than one thing. Sometimes when i paint more expressionistically with bold splashes of neon and messy lines and marks, I feel liberated yet at the same time unsure that what i have made is authentic to me or worth showing anyone. I feel like the kind of traveller who wants to go into the wilderness but not without their cell phone.
Maybe one day, I will show that wild part of me, My anger. My depression. My dark side. So far I am still drawn to create beauty and poetry in my work, and I will continue on this path, but who knows what lies ahead on this journey.
Regardless of my desired destination as a painter, My abstract painting is always an adventure. I could never trace back my steps to the beginning.
I am out in the back-country of my own imagination. It’s one brushstroke after another and just staying present to the experience, like wandering off the trail but knowing your way back home.
This one is called the Poetry of Water. It has a watery feeling to it with blue reflections and a feeling of
mystery in the limited palette. I called it finished because the painting seemed to say it was satisfied with itself. But like the famous quote
a painting is never finished only abandoned
And finally this one takes me to feelings of wild nature and quiet places– not a particular place but the feelings of many places.
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Undoubtedly I will move away from where the work is about beauty, symmetry, and love and allow ideas and concepts to inform more of what I paint but for now I am happy with my dreamscapes and expressing my awe of nature.
