Recently I received email from an artist who was finding it difficult to paint without having some kind of "subject matter" to start from. She suggested there wasn't much out there on how to paint abstract art, and that maybe I could write a book about it. Well, I don't think I'm ready to start a book on it just yet, but her question made me think about the whole topic.
When I was young, I drew and painted from life subjects--portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. Sometimes I copied from a photograph or a reproduction of someone else's art. The goal at that time was to represent what I saw as closely as possible. Later I began to care about color, composition, and style. But it wasn't until my late teens that I began to "abstract" or move away from reality. I still began with a subject, but I did not feel bound to represent it, only to use it as a starting off point for my own purposes.
In my early twenties, when I was at Cooper Union art school, I found myself retreating from representation. We had to take life drawing with live models, but I always sought to abstract the forms in spite of my teacher's disapproval. By the time I left Cooper Union, I had moved into what we then called "nonobjective" art, or art without reference to any particular subject.
All art is abstract in the sense that it is not the object itself. Many who call themselves "abstract artists" are indeed painting a subject, but freely stylizing that subject. If you want to paint "abstract" but have trouble figuring out how to approach the canvas, try taking a subject you have painted before and abstracting it.
If you are painting from life, for example, try squinting your eyes until all you can see are the blurry outlines of your subject. Forget the details. Take your brush or pencil and sketch in the broad shapes and contours. Or take a very small section of your subject and blow it up to cover your whole canvas.
Now stand back and see how your composition unfolds, how the shapes take form and become interesting in and of themselves, without reference to your subject. Add color capriciously, that is, without reference to reality. How do these colors work together?
Keep playing with your composition, adding and subtracting shapes, modifying color, strengthening lines. Follow what draws you in, scrap what doesn't. Work fast, and then stop and study what you have.
This is one approach, and it might help if you want to create abstract art, but feel that you don't know where to begin.
