Abstract Art

How to Paint Abstract Art, Part II

In my last post I suggested painting non-representational art by gradually moving away from realism.  If you want to try painting abstract art but have no idea where to start, another approach is to use your emotions to get you started.

Listening to music is one way I enhance my emotions when I paint.  Sometimes I choose music to reflect my current mood:  new age, jazz or classical for reflective moods, rock for strong, driving emotions, and so forth.  Sometimes a particular mood develops as I listen to and empathize with the lyrics of a song.   

Music's rhythm and tempo can also have an influence on the quality and speed with which you apply a paintbrush or palette knife to the canvas.  How you apply the paint will be reflected in the result, leaving a trace of the musical rhythm you were listening to as you made it.  Try this experiment some time:    think of yourself as an instrument or tool of the music in your head.  Relax and let the music select colors, control the movement of your hands, and create the content.

Aside from music, emotion itself can drive the painting process.  Non-representational art is the best way to directly express emotion because it isn't constrained by attempting to be "true" to a particular subject matter.  If you wake up mad at the world, you can paint a jagged swath of red across the canvas, directly expressing your anger.  Color, line, form--everything in your painter's arsenal are available to say exactly how you are feeling. 

One day when I was in a particularly dark mood, I kept feeling "bloody secret" as I painted.  Yet I wanted this feeling to be both exposed and hidden at the same time.  The result was my painting, "Tied in a Bow."  I painted the bloody secret in thick red paint in the center of the canvas, but I also tied it in a bow and framed it prettily in pink.

If you are feeling a strong emotion of any kind, try expressing it directly through color, line and form on the canvas.  But whatever method you use to begin an abstract painting, you’ll end up with the same concerns for composition, interest, energy, and focus to decide when it is finished.

How to Paint Abstract Art

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.

The Bipolar Dementia Art Chronicles

The memoir I've been working on for five years is finally in print.  I have published books in the past with Regnery & Company, Fearon Publishers, Watson-Guptill, and others.  I've even had an agent.  But it's gotten a lot harder to find agents and publishers today, and I got tired of sending out query letters and waiting months for a reply. 

After some research, I found Booklocker.Com and decided to publish my book with them through POD (print on demand) and ebook (a pdf format file which is downloaded from the internet and read with Adobe Reader software).  I am very happy with the results--my book looks like any other paperback you might find at Amazon or Borders.  I'm also thrilled with the cover design they did for me:

In this book I struggle to make art in spite of ongoing depression and the overwhelming responsibility of managing the lives of my father and ex-mother-in-law as they age, and their mental and physical health deteriorates.

If you are interested in the life of an artist, issues of depression and bipolar disorder, or the challenges of caregiving for elderly parents, I think you will find this book a moving account of one woman's experience with all three.

Lynne Taetzsch's issues of aging parents, sibling conflict, depression, bipolar disorder, sandwich generations, health care bureaucracies and facilities, the creative instinct, the meaning of life, and the possibility of happiness will touch a wide readership in our times. Told with quiet humor and insight, her memoir is both healing and compulsively readable. --Pamela Evans, Evans Editorial Services.

The book is available through Booklocker.Com.  It can also be ordered from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or any other bookstore.

End of the Black and White Paintings

It's been gray in Ithaca for weeks on end, with snow covering the ground most of this time.  Such a setting provided the inspiration for my black and white paintings--all I saw outside my window were shades from white to black. 

The last couple of days it's been warmer, causing the snow to melt.  Today the sun is actually out, and it feels like spring.  This is fitting weather for the close of my black and white paintings.  Adrian and I are flying to California tomorrow to visit family for a week, so I'll have lots of new visual stimuli to react to.

Here are the last three paintings in this series, actually the first three paintings I've finished in 2006: RINGED MIGRATION

PARSING FULLNESS

ONLY NOW

As you can see, other colors started to creep into the shades of black and white.  I love visiting the black and white world, but I don't want to live there.

When a Painting Gets "Stuck"

I had a long break in painting over the past holidays.  First, we had a friend stay with us for a few days, then I got sick, and now finally I'm back at work.  The first painting I tackled went very well, but the second one still eludes me.  I had begun this painting before the holiday break, and perhaps that made it harder to get back to.  What was I thinking originally?  Who knows, not me.

The background on this painting was black with two-inch parchment stripes across it.  I had worked on it once or twice after that, and there was a design or pattern taking shape, but it seemed too amorphous.  What I like to do often is to bring order out of chaos while leaving in enough signs of the chaos to retain a sense of ambiguity or chance.  There is a delicate balance that I find if I'm lucky. 

The reason I bring "luck" into it is that you have to simply take the plunge and try something to see if it works.  If it doesn't, you can't simply "erase it" and start over.  Once you've made a major move on a painting, you are pretty much committed to making it work.  You're not going to be able to remove the last layer of paint without disturbing what was beneath it. 

Well, on this particular painting, I chose to use raw umber lines to outline the parchment shapes, thereby creating more definition and less chaos.  From there, I went on to feather those lines with a brush, and the painting did look much better at that point.  I could almost have signed it and moved on.

That might have been the wiser choice, but instead I kept working at further definition, filling in more spaces with black, then re-emphasizing the parchment with parchment lines.  What happened is that I went too far in the defining direction, which then left the amorphous background looking out of place or "wrong."  To sum it up, I destroyed the delicate balance I had going for me and now the painting is completely out of kilter.  There's no way to simply "tinker" with it to bring it into balance. 

When the canvas dries, I'll take a photo and post it.  After that, I'll tackle it again and see what happens.

Later: Here it is, my "stuck" painting:

Here are a couple that worked much better, GAMES WE PLAY and IF I HAD THE KEY: