We recently moved our daughter to a new apartment. While helping to load stuff in the car, I picked up a painting I had given to her a few years ago. It was created during the time we lived in a two hundred year old house with an abundance of windows surrounded by a property with only one tree to block the sun. In Ohio sun is a precious commodity.
I was affected artistically by the old house, fascinated by its history, my imagination kindled by layers created over more than a century of time. Its blocky shaker influence and primitive surfaces stirred my love of folk art, with its child-like elements intended as story rather than technical accomplishment. It’s simplicity of design, powerful color, quirky lines, shapes, patterns and texture give folk art its characteristic humor and charm. I wanted to infuse my work with the same personality.
The inner heart of the old house was inspiring but its location and outside environment determined we leave. Now, several years later, the paintings I have chosen to hang are from the collection created while under its spell. This is the art I want to look at every day: funky and playful, intentional yet unplanned, imperfect but settled. It’s also a style of art mostly misunderstood because of its child-likeness.
A realistic painting will gain the “wows and whoops” of an impressed audience for the sheer accomplishment of replicating a scene in paint. The skill of an artist who makes paintings look “just like the real thing” is held as the highest standard of accomplishment. It’s ok to admire the performance of photo-realistic artists. The time and personality it takes to create hyper-realism is to be recognized as an accomplishment. But photo-realism is only one style in the world of self-expression and “good” art.
Have you spent much time in the Modern Art section of an art museum and asked yourself, “Why is this here?!” Me too. Some people relate to it but most will just give it a shrug and pass by because its often hard to understand or even like. But surprisingly, expressionistic and abstract art requires equal skill in using the elements of art as realism does. The struggle to identify what makes good art can be intensified by clamor over what makes art ART.
The challenge of creating intuitively, following where the painting leads, is more ambitious for me than painting from life or a realistic subject. I have a plan and direction for a landscape or still-life. I can think it through before I begin to paint, correcting composition and value patterns, and then begin with a sketch to map my goal. I usually have a photo — or several — as reference to guide what I want my paintbrush to accomplish.
But sometimes I just want to splash on some paint, make some marks, and let a paintbrush record what I’m feeling. No end in sight, no goal to reach, no standard to hold. Just wild, unplanned, uncontrolled, misunderstood art! This is painting at its most honest, most revealing, and most therapeutic. The emotions revealed by this artistic tantrum are real and deep; I may not even be aware of their existence in my thinking until I stand back and take a look at what I’ve painted. My next brushstrokes are inspired from there.
Where does this paint-play take me? I reached the point where practiced knowledge takes over as I begin to rein in the work with tools and rules of making art — those elements and principles by which art is refined. Application of these “rules” must be applied gently to bring order without obliterating the spontaneous beauty of childlikeness. As Picasso is credited with saying: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” As adults — or learned artists — we can tend to fall in love with rules and laws and guidelines and miss the heart of living well (or creating) in freedom and joy.
Abstract painting — and its relatives like folk art, expressionism, cubism, fauvism, even graffiti — is like looking at forest. You’ve heard it said, “I can’t see the forest through the trees”; abstract art focuses on forest-minimalism rather than details of trees, highlighting what is most interesting. Groups of trees may be seen as a collective shape rather than trunks, branches, twigs and leaves. Abstraction pares a subject down to its artistic essence of shape, line, color, texture, space and form. To put it another way, a subject is stripped down to its studs so it can be remodeled into another life.
Our forest of trees may inspire a creative combination of colors placed spontaneously across a canvas. Color is the subject rather than trees.
Pen-and-ink lines can reflect texture and an illusion of movement as wind blows through tree tops. The finished drawing is about line and rhythm rather than trees.
Even a realistic landscape painting of the forest can be about light rather than trees and a path.
Understanding abstract art comes from seeing how the artist has been affected by what they have seen. It’s not always pretty.
My own flirtations with the misunderstood art styles of abstract and folk art have changed the way I paint. These days my “realistic” pieces are made up of abstracted areas in balance with more realistic elements. I find myself using detail less often than I did in earlier art. Today my goal is simplicity; simple truth in the big picture of life.
It’s my hope my paintings will allow us to walk together, hand in hand in the beauty of simplicity. We can side-step the complications of our world for a few minutes and rest in the presence of sweetness.
It is my hope that through my work we may bask together in the presence of the One Who created us, Who desires us to see Him in the small things as well as the grand.
Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world. Matthew 28:20
