One of my students in How to Look at Art this semester protested that abstract art seemed to him to be "without intention," which I take to mean that there doesn't seem to be much thought put into it in its distance from recognizable figures. My painting above actually took a great deal of thought and time in execution, and it is based upon landscape--the sun rising over a green hill. There is cloud, rain, and grass. But sometimes I've produced abstraction that isn't based on anything but its own gestural form, as in Scherzo, a piece I did a couple of years ago which I still like, a Pollockian swirl and spatter of paint:
But I've also had some time for realism lately, such as in the piece below that I did in early summer, based loosely on a photograph taken near Loveland Pass in Colorado in early June of 2011 when the snow was still deep on the higher elevations. The guy on the horse is a long-time friend of mine who loves the mountains:
The work of painting and drawing goes on--abstract or realist--and it's always a labor of love.
No comments:
Post a Comment