Creating Abstract Art

Ideas and Inspirations for Passionate Art-Making

Dean Nimmer

Cincinnati, OH

CreateMixedMedia.com

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LAME DEER

Robert Neuman

Mixed media on canvas

Introduction

ALIEN ART CONNOISSEURS

Gary Hallgren

Ink on paper

Like the word art itself, abstract art cannot be clearly defined or categorized. I choose to go with the flow, make work and celebrate abstract art for its nonconformist place in the world of art. In other words, doing beats thinking about doing in this book. With certainty more artists than ever choose to work abstractly, as they see an endless supply of ideas and uncharted territory yet to explore.

I believe the continuing interest in abstract art lies in its ability to inspire our curiosity about the reaches of an artist’s creative subconscious.

My goal is to show you numerous pathways to looking at, thinking about and, most importantly, creating abstract art. To achieve that, you’ll use the most valuable asset for making evocative and meaningful abstract artwork: your innate curiosity.

You’ll find a focus here on the power of abstract art to delve into the surreal realms of imagery swimming around in our heads. I want to help you find your own unique identity as an abstract artist by addressing the obstacles that limit your creativity.

I aim to inspire you to move beyond the myths and stereotypes that abound for abstract art in order to discover the myriad of possibilities for making inventive and original pictures without inhibition or fear of failure, all the while enjoying the creative process itself!

To that end, I will not give you step-by-step instructions on making a particular style of abstract painting or sculpture, nor will I give you a recipe for how to make something look abstract.

I want my experience from a forty-year career as an artist and art educator and nearly two hundred exhibitions of my abstract work in the United States and abroad to motivate and encourage you to get completely absorbed in creating abstract art yourself.

This book is organized much like my first publication, Art From Intuition, in that we’ll be working with a base project description and series of exercises that start you out on a path, yet let you explore different directions to take. In other words, I’ll give you an idea as a starting point and encourage you to follow your own instincts to see what evolves from there.

That’s why the artworks shown in this book illustrate very different outcomes from the individuals who began with the same set of guidelines. You’ll find several excellent projects in this book that were first introduced in Art From Intuition but that have been expanded to focus on making abstract art.

You can think of this book as a kind of scavenger hunt where you find clues that direct you to something that excites your imagination. For those of you who are flea market fans like me, think about the fun you have finding something exceptional hidden among the ordinary cast-offs. Finding treasures in uncharted territory is the instinct I’m hoping to bring out in you.

In essence, I want this book to be fun to read and easy to use without exhausting your attention span or your wallet. I’ll keep the emphasis on making instead of thinking about making. In addition, most of the projects in this book can be created using low-tech, inexpensive materials.

Some basics to keep in mind:

• This book is not set up to read or work from in chronological order. You can choose any chapter or project that perks up your interest and begin making something without worrying that you’ve skipped ahead and missed something you should know first.
• The projects in the book should be approached as if you were sketching out an idea in a spontaneous way rather than putting the finishing touches on a painting. In other words, I want you to look for possibilities that you can develop further.
• Each project is accompanied by sample works made by students and practicing artists showing what each did with the same set of instructions. Again, these do not show what your piece should look like; rather, each one represents an individual’s creative idea inspired by that particular project.
• Consider building specific categories of work that you may keep in separate folders or portfolios as you do the projects in the book. I recommend you have these for sketch projects you want to take further such as TBC (To Be Continued), where the sketch you made suggests a bigger scale, using different materials or simply a new idea that you want to pursue from this inspiration.
  Your TBC portfolio can also provide you with useful parts that can be combined or collaged into new works.

The other portfolio I’d keep is for those pieces you think you hate and you’d just as soon tear up. The irony of the so-called “Hate It!” art you make is that you may change your mind once something is tucked away for a few weeks, plus there may be some treasures in this “trash” that you didn’t see the first time around.

In addition, any pieces you feel came out great or finished as they are can go in a separate portfolio or be put on display as you choose.

• The materials I recommend using in this book are generally inexpensive and easy to come by, since I don’t want you to dwell on the cost or preciousness of what you’re making. You always have the option of substituting any materials of your choice for those I’m recommending.
• Some of the projects in this book may seem to overlap or use the same ingredients to reach different conclusions. For example, a project in the basic elements section of chapter one that focuses on line may also have a similar series of steps that conclude with a focus on texture. There are important distinctions between line as the main character in one project and an emphasis on texture in another.
• I’ve included the works and artist statements by fifty artists in this publication so you can consider the wide variety of ideas and approaches being practiced by abstract artists today. I hope you find their work and ideas to be an inspiration to delve into abstract art yourself.
• The projects offered in this book will not tell you the correct order of stages in a process to achieve a desired result. To the contrary, I want to get your creative juices flowing and see where your imagination takes you, and the desired result is one that can’t be precisely pictured or described. In other words, you won’t hear me say or imply that any composition you come up with “should” necessarily look anything like an artwork pictured in this book. And using this book to inspire your art-making simply works better if you embrace the fact that every project leads to choices and options that have any number of positive results.
• Since you know you can’t control the likes and dislikes of anyone else, it’s important to focus on what works for you and tune out the noise in your head about the possible popularity of what you make.
  I know that this more open-ended process can be somewhat frustrating, making you feel a bit adrift, not knowing exactly where you’re going, but the need to take pleasure in exploring uncharted territory is an essential part of the nature of abstraction that you can either embrace with enthusiasm for the challenges it poses to your imagination or choose to constantly fight with that part of yourself that insists on predictability and order. If that stuffy, opinionated part of yourself keeps winning out, you’ll get less out of reading and practicing what’s in this book than you might have if you just let go!

You can be confident that whatever direction you pursue using the projects and ideas in this book, you’ll have fun, and whatever your resulting picture or artwork looks like, your pieces will be a unique personal expression from your own creative subconscious. And though you’ll make some pieces you like and others you won’t like, the only thing you can do wrong in art is not make art.

STORM

Dean Nimmer

Oil, charcoal and graphite on paper

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) is the first man who, with paint and brush, created a nonrepresentational work of art. In his memoirs, Kandinsky described the actual moment of the accidental discovery of nonrepresentational or abstract art when he was forty-four years old. Coming home at sunset from an outdoor session 1910, his mind still absorbed by his work, he was struck as he entered his studio by an “indescribably beautiful painting, all irradiated by an interior light.” In the mysterious canvas he could distinguish only “forms and colors and no meaning.” Suddenly he realized that it was one of his own paintings, turned on its side. “The next day I tried to recapture my previous impression. I only succeeded half way. Even with the painting on its side, I could always find the object, but the blue light of dusk was missing. I knew then precisely that objects were harming my painting.” He felt “a terrifying abyss opening under my feet.” Suddenly one man, Kandinsky, stood up and, instead of facing outward from himself, turned and looked into himself.

The Artist in His Studio, rev. ed— Liberman, Alexander

IMPROVISATION NO. 26 (ROWING), C. 1912

Wassily Kandinsky

Oil on canvas

Courtesy of Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany / The Bridgeman Art Library

CHAPTER ONE

Get Started and Keep Going!

A major obstacle to making abstract art is the barrier in your mind that questions whether abstract art is a legitimate art form, legitimate for you at least.

This block may be because you still wonder whether abstract art is really art at all. Possibly you think you have to master realism before you can work abstractly. It could be that you worry your friends and family won’t approve. Or maybe it’s simply that you don’t know how to begin making an abstract composition.

The quick answers to these issues are as follows:

2. Historically, abstract art is a legitimate art form; that judgment was settled over a century ago.
3. No, you don’t have to earn a diploma in realism before you make abstract art, and no one checks your artistic credentials at the door.
4. If you routinely did everything that your friends and family approved of, you would not have picked up this book in the first place. Artists of whatever stripe are rebels against the grain of society no matter what they choose to do, and you should think of making abstract art as an outsider’s merit badge that sets you apart from the crowd.
5. Worrying about any of the above factors can stop you before you begin, and frankly the only relevant question is “How do I start making an abstract composition right now?”
   Where art comes from is a mystery. It comes unannounced. It has the quality of gift. The source from where it comes is hidden from us. Like all creativity, it stands us in possibility. It comes from impulse and dream, from raiding the inarticulate, from going below the floor of consciousness. To do this we must break free of the confines of the known and fixed. As artists we do this with our materials—with our hands. And in this confluence of mind and matter abstraction is not only relevant, it is essential. —Timothy Hawkesworth

MAYO DRAWING #14

Timothy Hawkesworth

Oil pencil and wax on paper

One of the hardest things to do in art—and maybe harder in abstract art—is to start making something on a pure white, blank page.

The blank canvas

Whether you’re confronting an empty canvas or a clean piece of paper or sitting there with a big lump of clay in your hands, trying to think about what to make can stop you dead in your tracks. And though I cannot suggest a wonder drug that will put you in the right frame of mind, this chapter’s goal is to get you started making something before your subconscious mind has a chance to say anything to stop you!

This first set of projects gives you some quick-start exercises that get you going. I recommend you think of these projects as warm-up exercises in the same way that musicians tune their instruments, dancers stretch and move to loosen up or writers put down a stream of consciousness.

The second group of projects uses the basic elements of art—line, shape, form, value, texture and color—as starting places from which to expand. These fundamental ingredients, found in some measure in all works of art, are logical places to initiate abstract compositions.

As previously mentioned, some of the projects in this and other chapters originated in my first book, Art From Intuition, but they are worth repeating because they are extremely effective tools for shifting your art engine from park into drive.

CAVE DWELLERS (IN PROCESS)

Barbara Moody

Acrylic, charcoal, ink and spray paint on paper

Icebreakers and Warm-Ups

The projects in this section allow you to get going on something without thinking or worrying about what you’re making. Keep in mind that these projects are designed to be fun to do, so don’t be self-conscious about “making art”—just enjoy the freedom of playing in the sand again!

Start with eleven dots

EXERCISE 1: Connecting Eleven Dots

This project suggests that you begin your drawing or painting by placing eleven small dots, at random, on a piece of paper and start connecting those dots with lines. Think of the dots as hubs or anchors for the lines to connect to in a variety of ways. You could approach this project as a kind of game to see what different compositions evolve as you explore variations that come with the placement of the dots on the page, their proximity to one another and how your composition develops using different techniques and mediums.

Remember the only rule here is to simply connect eleven dots with lines. Questions may come up such as “How many lines do I make?” “Are these straight lines, curved lines, broken lines?” These can be answered in so many ways, and the pleasure of this line game is discovering new solutions each time you work on this project.

I don’t recommend thinking about many of your choices before you start working. This project, like many others in this book, works best when you approach the challenge spontaneously.

Because there are so many possible directions to go with this project, I want to keep things simple at first, so I recommend you use only one color or black and white for the first eleven dot project and save color and collage variations for separate projects. Of course, you can always skip ahead to color or collage variations if you choose. As with all projects in this book, you start with an initial set of guidelines and then you take it anywhere you want from there.

Recommended Materials

• monochrome (one color) or black-and-white media (any wet or dry media including water- or oil-based paints, pencils, charcoal, pastels, markers or wax crayons)
• plain drawing paper, 9” × 12” (23cm × 30cm) or larger
• optional: ruler, French curve templates, erasers
  Eleven Dot black-and-white line composition

The beginning of an Eleven Dot line composition

LINES CONNECTED TO PULLEYS

Ink on paper

EXERCISE 2: Connecting Eleven Dots With Color and More

In the second project you can use the initial eleven dots as a way to begin a composition and keep going by adding color, collage, shapes and textures along the way. Think of the original lines you make as part of a skeleton or superstructure that you’ll use to build your composition. There are limitless possibilities for compositions that begin with just eleven dots!

Recommended Materials

colors, techniques and materials are open to your preferences

ELEVEN DOT COLOR LINE COMPOSITION

Colored pencil and watercolor

ELEVEN DOT COLOR LINE COMPOSITION

Talya Sahler

Charcoal and watercolor

ELEVEN DOT COLOR LINE COMPOSITION

Janet Stupak

Markers, crayons and watercolor

EXERCISE 3: Automatic Drawing — Just Start and Go!

This is a good project to help you get past thinking about the outcome before you start the making. A key aspect is that you must keep focused on moving forward rather than try to control what is taking shape in front of you. This is kind of a natural metamorphosis in abstract art since there’s always the prospect for the shapes, lines and textures to evolve into new structures as you draw or paint.

Begin your automatic drawing by making a mark on a piece of paper with any kind of black-and-white or color medium and just go wherever that takes you. No need to predetermine what kind of mark should come first or how to proceed from there, nor is there any model for what the resulting drawing should look like.

You simply have to trust the process, keep making more lines and shapes and repeating actions as your composition starts taking form. If you haven’t done this kind of spontaneous drawing before, think of this process like you did the first time you tried to ride a bike without training wheels—get on, start pedaling, build momentum and ride!

Recommended Materials

• 18” × 24” (46cm × 61cm) drawing paper
• charcoal (soft and medium)
• colored pencils
• compressed charcoal
• erasers
• pastels
  Dena Hengst working on an automatic drawing

UNTITLED

Christopher Willingham

Charcoal on paper

EXERCISE 4: Automatic Drawing — Delete, Delete, Delete

This is a variation of automatic drawing, similar to the process in the previous exercise, involving toning the paper first with charcoal until the entire surface of the paper is covered with an even shade of dark gray or black. Proceed to make initial marks as you did in the last project, except use an eraser as your drawing tool, carving out your white marks as negative shapes from the field of black charcoal. Once you open up some white areas, you can add lines or textures with pastels as positive shapes anywhere in your composition.

Recommended Materials

• 18”× 24” (46cm × 61cm) drawing paper
• compressed charcoal
• kneaded or white erasers
• pastels
  UNTITLED

Amber Krawczyk

Charcoal, pastel and erasers

UNTITLED

James Presnell

Charcoal, pastel and erasers

EXERCISE 5: Action Painting — Easy to Start, Hard to Stop

Before you do anything, put down some plastic drop cloths and get the cats and dogs out of the room so you can have some fun with this by yourself.

This project asks you to revisit those basic creative passions that were so strong in your childhood by sticking your fingers in paint and playing for the pure pleasure of the process. If you can suspend your inhibitions about acting like a kid for a few hours, this project will help you find the roots of your creative intuition and inspire a renewed sense of excitement and adventure in your art making.

Action painting is nothing more than letting the paint do what it wants to do with a little help from you. The first thing to try might be the loosest form of action painting, where you begin by soaking a brush with paint and dripping and splashing paint onto your paper or canvas. Let the paint spatter and drip as you make bold, impromptu gestures, or change to more subtle patterns of movement to see what kinds of marks those gestures create.

Try using brushes of different sizes and paints of different colors, and let your marks merge together on the canvas.

The first few times you try action painting should be purely experimental. The important thing to remember is that unpredictability is what you are after, so you can revel in the pure enjoyment of playing with the paint. Begin to experiment with different approaches: Try flinging paint off the brush to create explosive spatters, dripping paint from different heights or pouring paint of different thicknesses (diluted with various amounts of water) onto the canvas at the same time.

Recommended Materials

• plastic drop cloths
• roll of butcher or wrapping paper
• tempera colors or cheap water-based house paints
• any other materials of your choice
  ACTION PAINTING

Janet Stupak

One of the unique things about action painting is that the resulting pictures are a visual record of the artist’s “dance” that created the painting in the first place.

Action painting emphasizes the dynamics of the painting process with a focus on movement, gesture and free-form play. This approach is a good place to start using your intuition because it allows you to use materials freely and to explore spontaneity and dynamic change without exerting overt control over the painting process. Action painting can involve your whole body, not just your hands, and allow you to use new tools and movements to make a work of art.

ACRYLIC ON PAPER

Peter Franchecetti

INK ON PAPER

Action painting project

The Basic Elements — You Can’t Make Anything Without Them

Like our DNA, all drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures share a few essential building blocks that are common to all artistic compositions. Though there is not universal agreement on fitting names for these fundamental ingredients, the six most common terms used by artists and art historians are line, shape, form, texture, value and color.

Each of these six elements is distinct from one another in the following ways:

• Line: An artist’s tool used to illustrate the outer edges of shapes and forms. Technically, no physical lines exist in nature. For example, there is not an actual line around an apple to distinguish it from the table it’s sitting on, nor is there a physical line between the sky and the land at the horizon; therefore, lines in art are an artist’s interpretation of the boundaries between forms in a scene, or the perceived edges of shapes in a composition. Repeated lines can also be used to create values and textures in two-dimensional and three-dimensional art.
• Shape: The outside two-dimensional contour, outline or border of a form, figure or structure.
• Form: The three-dimensional representation of a shape. In drawings, paintings and other two-dimensional art, the artist creates the illusion of a three-dimensional form in space using light, shadow and other rendering techniques. In sculpture, the form is the manifestation of the object itself.
• Texture: The distinctive surface qualities found on all things as well as the overall visual patterns and tactile feel of objects and their surroundings.
• Value: The relative lightness or darkness of shapes, forms and backgrounds of two-dimensional or three-dimensional compositions. Value plays a prominent role in both black-and-white and color artworks, potentially adding dramatic contrasts and depth to an otherwise bland composition.
• Color: The spectrum of hues, values and intensities of natural light and man-made pigments, paints and mineral compounds that can be used in all art forms.
  The challenge in the following projects is to focus on each individual element as the main player in an abstract composition in order to exploit its potential and inspire new direction in your work. I’m providing at least one project that emphasizes each basic element in this section, but I’m sure you could easily come up with many variations and projects yourself. All of these projects also fit the quick-start theme in this chapter, so read the basic idea, gather your materials and get going!

BOSTON

Joseph Pickman

Acrylic on canvas

LINE

Even though line is an artistic invention that is not part of the natural world, it may be the most used element found in artistic compositions of all kinds. And whether line is used to rough out preliminary sketches or as the key part of a finished artwork, it’s the workhorse of the basic elements.

The following exercises ask you to consider the variables of line qualities such as thick and thin, sharp or smooth, passive or aggressive and so on, as the vocabulary for your compositions emphasizing line. Think of line as if it were the superstructure of a house you are building, where the integrity of the final project is dependent on the strategy for using the line.

ROOM

Angela McGuire

Graphite on paper

Broken line composition

EXERCISE 6: Line Compositions With Adhesive Tape

Adhesive tape can be used to make interesting compositions that are distinctive because of their textures, colors and the variety of available tape widths. Tape may be an unlikely art material, but you’ll find lots of possibilities here. The basic process is to make linear compositions with the tape by changing the variables of tape width, length, texture and color. Though each composition you make will be different, you don’t necessarily have to use all the variables in each composition. You can also combine tape with charcoal, paint, ink and other media to expand on the possibilities. There are no rules or limits to what you can do with tape, and your compositions can expand in many directions.

Recommended Materials

• paper or surface of your choice
• assorted tapes: duct tape, masking tape, painter’s tape, Scotch tape, etc.
• optional: charcoal, ink, paint, etc., roll of butcher or wrapping paper
• tempera colors or cheap water-based house paints
• any other materials of your choice
  Tape/line project

Tape/line project

Tape/line project

EXERCISE 7: Unique Chalk-Line Compositions

Chalk lines are a unique material for their soft surface quality, atmospheric color and the distinctive marks they make on paper. The nice thing about using a chalk line is that you can ignore the practical functions it was designed for and focus on the aesthetic qualities intrinsic to the material itself.

Chalk-line tools are designed to make straight lines on a flat surface by pulling the line taut with a partner, holding it against the paper and snapping the line. You can approach this as a spontaneous drawing, making lines at random until you see a composition forming, or work out a schematic idea about where the line should go. Connecting eleven random dots with chalk lines may be an easy entry into this project. You may want to use chalk as a beginning stage and add paint or other materials later.

Chalk comes in a few standard colors—red, blue, yellow and green—but you can substitute raw powdered pigments in any color to replace commercial chalk and get more color variety in your composition. To draw using a chalk line I recommend working on large paper or canvas—30” × 40” (76cm × 102cm) or greater—for the best effect. The most economical paper for large-scale drawings like this is butcher paper, in white or brown, that comes in 24” to 72” × 50’ to 100’ rolls (61cm to 183cm × 15m to 30m). Black tar paper and red construction paper also work well as does plain giftwrap paper that comes in wide widths and long lengths.

Recommended Materials

• butcher paper
• chalk-line tools
• tar paper or construction paper
  POINT A, B AND C

Paul Thomas

Chalk-line drawing

SHAPE

Like finding a wonderfully formed stone or unusual seashell on the beach, it’s often the shape of something that catches our eye. In the studio, artists may choose to emphasize a shape as the main element in a composition because of the same allure that attracts us to objects in nature.

The following projects are focused on shape as the subject, and they challenge you to invent compositions that celebrate shape over other features in your art.

UNTITLED

Jennifer Moses

Oil on wood panel

SHAPE COMPOSITION

Acrylic on paper

EXERCISE 8: Shape Takes the Stage!

An obvious way to emphasize shape in a composition is to inflate the shapes in relation to the proportions of the surface on which they are drawn. This may seem like a simple task, but there are many subtle nuances in play beyond just making something look big. The trick is to present a shape (or shapes) that attracts the eye without being overwhelmed by other competing elements such as line, texture and color. The point here is not to win the Best Shape Alone Award as that has no benefit in your art making. Rather, take this up as a challenge to bring a focal point to your composition, and leave the viewers fascinated by what they see!

The instructions then for this project are simple: Make a big shape on your paper and develop it as you go. Use your instincts to decide what looks right and then leave it alone! Decisions about the type of shape and its color and texture are limitless.

Recommended Materials

media and substrate of your choice

Tangled shapes

EXERCISE 9: Shadow Hunting

Though shadows are all around us, they are often ignored for their potential as subject matter in art. Shadows are a rich resource to find intriguing shapes in our environment.

This project requires searching for a variety of shadows that can be indoors behind bright lights or outside on a sunny day. The mission of the shadow hunt is to sketch as many different kinds of shadow shapes as possible without necessarily thinking about how they will be used in your work.

First, find interesting shadows outdoors, and sketch their outlines on separate pieces of paper. You can also combine two or more shadows on a single sheet of paper to make more complex shape configurations. Try to gather at least a dozen shadow sketches on separate sheets of paper, at least 18” × 24” (46cm × 61cm). Consider making your sketches at a time of day when sunlight is most intense overhead or when the sun casts long, exaggerated shadows as it nears the horizon.

The shadow-drawing project is also well suited for working with a partner. In this variation, each partner takes a turn drawing the shadow outlines and, alternately, posing to create the shadows for his partner. “Move this way,” “Bend your arm a little more,” “Reach out at more of an angle” and so on—until he sees a shadow to trace. Each partner takes a turn posing for shadows and tracing shadow outlines until they both have about twenty separate shadow sketches.

Once you have your stock of shadows, you can begin working into these sketches as you did in the last project using any mediums of your choice.

Choose those drawings that seem to lend themselves to a direct application of black-and-white or color mediums. You may find some interesting shadow outlines that can be developed by adding either paint or charcoal to negative (empty) space around the traced outlines or working with your medium into the positive (solid) shapes inside the traced shadow lines.

One of the objectives of this exercise is developing interesting compositions that emphasize the dramatic character of these unusual shapes.

Recommended Materials

• 18” × 24” (46cm × 61cm) newsprint or Bond paper
• compressed charcoal, markers or other media
• soft pencils
  Shadow drawing

Partner shadow drawing

Shadow drawing

Tracing shadows

Finding shadows

SIGNALS

Janet Stupak

Acrylic on paper

NEGATIVE SHAPE

The painting by Hale Allen showing the silhouettes of electric wires is a good example of how the white negative spaces are as important to the dynamics of this composition as are the black positive shapes that tell us what the thing is in the picture. In other words, it’s the negative shapes here that keep your eye moving, and that makes this composition a lot more interesting than just a painting of a telephone pole.

Understanding negative space is a primary way of showing you a different avenue to solve the mysteries of perspective, foreshortening and contour drawing without going through more complicated techniques to accomplish the same thing. My purpose is to tap into the potential of using negative space shapes for your abstract work.

The basic process for drawing negative spaces first requires that you see what they look like and find where they’re hiding. Even before you begin drawing a subject that emphasizes negative space, it’s important that you draw a rectangular frame around the outer edge of the paper. This border gives you a frame of reference so you can see the shape of a negative space surrounding an object against a clear boundary line. The subject does not have to be in the middle of the border, but the negative space is easier to see this way.

One example that demonstrates negative space is the classic brainteaser illustration showing a picture of a vase rendered in a conventional way alongside of a rendering of the same vase showing only the negative space around the vase.

Depending on how you look at the negative space illustration, you see either the flat outline of the vase or two faces shown in silhouette. This drawing shows how the negative space is easier to see when you create an outside border around an image to better illustrate the shapes of the negative space.

UNTITLED

Hale Allen

Acrylic on canvas

Positive and negative shapes vase

EXERCISE 10: Making a Positive From a Negative

The point of this project is first to be able to see and find negative shapes in ordinary things around you and then to create compositions that emphasize and take advantage of those elusive spaces between things that you haven’t paid much attention to before. The first step is to choose a common object like a chair or stool that has some interesting negative spaces around and inside the form and draw the negative shapes using only line to describe the negative space contours you see.

Seeing the negative spaces depends on the viewing angle you have. For example, drawing a stool that is at eye level and straight in front of you may yield less interesting negative spaces than if you looked at the stool from below or above or turned on an angle offering better negative shapes. Remember we’re trying to find interesting negative shapes to be the subject of our composition, and you don’t need to be concerned with rendering the physical things that provide the shapes you’re drawing. This is a method of extracting the specific contours of unique negative shapes to be used in an abstract composition, and there are no other obligations accompanying that process.

So for our purposes, you don’t necessarily need to strictly adhere to rendering these shapes with detailed accuracy, but you are looking to trace the uniquely quirky twists and turns and abnormal silhouettes common to negative spaces that make them fascinating as shapes on their own.

You can use the shadow drawing exercise from the previous project as a way to record the negative spaces that surround the dark shadows cast on your paper. Using this method, you can draw as many shapes as you want by moving the paper around and layering different shapes together. Once you’ve got the shape composition set in line, you can work into those shapes with any materials and colors you wish.

Recommended Materials

• drawing paper
• pencil, charcoal or markers
• optional: digital camera and photo-editing software
  Drawing negative space patterns

Negative space composition

You can also do this project using a digital camera to record interesting negative spaces in the environment. Using a software program like Adobe Photoshop you can exaggerate the negative space by using the Threshold tool to strip away all of the color and gray tones, leaving a stark black-and-white contrast. You can then use your color palette and painting tools to create an infinite variety of computer-generated compositions. You can also choose to print these photos out and use them as a sketch for a composition in another medium.

By the way, anyone who thinks that using photographs in this way is somehow cheating may take it as a clue to leave the cave he’s been living in for too long.

Positive shapes

Using Threshold tool in Photoshop

Colorized computer print emphasizing negative space

Negative shapes silhouette

Negative shapes render ed silhouette

Negative space composition

Negative shapes template

Cut paper negative space collage

SHAPE AND FORM

It’s true that the distinctions between shape and form are like two sides of the same coin. It is simply that shapes are flat two-dimensional outlines and forms are sculptural three-dimensional constructs. I wouldn’t worry if you mix up these two words in a conversation about art (e.g., “I like the forms you’re using in this painting”). Even though the correct word in a two-dimensional painting is shape.

Frankly, no one cares if you use these words interchangeably, and I’m not trying to add another element to correct your artspeak usage. The reason I’m making the distinction is so you can make some interesting art by mixing the two together.

For example, Francesca Pastine creates a very interesting composition in her piece Artforum 24, which combines groups of flat contoured shapes that are cut out from an Artforum magazine along with the three-dimensional form made up from the layers themselves in this artwork. Olivia Bernard takes advantage of intriguing flat and dimensional shapes and forms in her Swan Song sculpture.

Similarly, Louise Kohrman creates a unique kind of print/sculpture called Forever in Mind by combining an etching process to make her subtle shapes on paper together with a three-dimensional form structure, which puts an equal emphasis on both shape and form.

The following projects suggest ways you can combine shapes and forms to make some thought-provoking abstract works.

FOREVER IN MIND (DETAIL)

Louise Kohrman

Hard ground etchings on translucent gampi paper

EXERCISE 11: Shape and Form Partnerships

Using Francesca Pastine, Louise Kohrman and Olivia Bernard’s examples as food for thought, make your own compositions that give an emphasis to both shape and form. This can be done using any techniques and media as long as the result has some measure of two-dimensional and three-dimensional combinations working together. By the way, this partnership doesn’t necessarily have to be an equal 50/50 distribution. The portions of two-dimensional and three-dimensional involved are totally up for grabs.

Recommended Materials

• assemblage materials (for three-dimensional aspect)
• collage materials (for two-dimensional aspect)
• substrate of your choice
  ARTFORUM 24

Francesca Pastine

Magazine and metal bar

SWAN SONG

Olivia Bernard

Chicken wire, abaca pulp, flax and pigment

EXERCISE 12: Shape to Form Transformations

This project is a process of removing a shape from the confines of the two-dimensional surface to use it as part of a low-relief composition that emphasizes shape. The first step in this process is to sketch the outlines of at least ten different shapes on white or colored, heavyweight craft paper using an HB or B grade pencil. You can draw these shapes freehand or use rulers and French curves or a combination of the two. The shapes should be simple geometric and/or organic forms that are spontaneously invented without thinking of how they may look when combined into a three-dimensional form.

Each individual shape you draw should be positioned in the middle of the paper like a paper doll cutout template. Make many more shapes than you think you’ll need so you’ll have options when putting them together. These shapes can be reworked and refined using an eraser until you get a form you like.

Once you have at least ten shapes to work with, start cutting them out and fitting them together to see how they work with each other. The goal is to discover new ideas for combining simple shapes together to make dynamic two-dimensional and three-dimensional compositions.

You can also pick out a drawing or painting you did before from your To Be Continued portfolio to use for this project by drawing a shape on top of it, cutting it out and reassembling it as a relief as pictured here.

Recommended Materials

• heavyweight craft paper—around 9” × 12” (23cm × 30cm)—various colors, 10 sheets
• white or colored illustration board —11” × 14” (28cm × 36cm) or larger
• glue sticks and Scotch tape
• HB or B pencil
• kneaded eraser
• scissors or craft knife
• optional: ruler and various French curve templates and fine-tipped markers
  Acrylic, ink and cut paper

TEXTURE

There are so many artists using texture for maximum effect that it’s difficult to say what’s the best way to approach it. As with the other basic elements, there’s usually a mixture that may have color, line, shape, etc. partnering with textural qualities, but I think you can see how distinct the textures are in the examples here. The following project puts texture in the limelight.

Texture project, simple pattern, using oil pastels

OUT #25

Timothy Hawkesworth

Oil on canvas

ORDINAL

Donna McCarthy

Ink and watercolor collagraph emphasizing texture

EXERCISE 13: Pattern and Texture for Effect

This project is pretty direct and simple to do. The emphasis is on texture itself, so you’re going to first create a geometric pattern and then use texture to embellish pieces of the pattern to make it more energized and interesting. Of course, more interesting is in the eye of the beholder, but this project gets you to use texture as a tool in your compositions, and it adds to your visual vocabulary overall.

The first thing to do is lay out a simple geometric composition on paper using a light HB or B pencil, in case you decide to change things. The simplest composition to start with may be just a small square, triangle or circle inside a larger square and then fill the empty spaces inside the small square and the space around it with varying textures as shown in these examples. You can use any medium for this, do it spontaneously or make a careful plan, but your goal is to get the most out of your textures.

From that beginning, you can create more elaborate compositions using more complex patterns. There are no limitations to what this pattern may be except to plug texture in it to ramp it up. Those are the basic parameters, but there’s a lot of room for variation by adding line, color and collage to the mix, which are shown in the examples of my students’ work illustrated here.

Recommended Materials

• heavyweight craft paper—around 9” × 12” (23cm × 30cm)—various colors, 10 sheets
• white or colored illustration board —11” × 14” (28cm × 36cm) or larger
• glue sticks and Scotch tape
• HB or B pencil
• kneaded eraser
• scissors or craft knife
• optional: ruler and various French curve templates and fine-tipped markers
  Texture/pattern composition, cut black-and-white paper

Texture/pattern composition, colored pencil

Texture/pattern composition, ink on paper

Texture/pattern composition, ink on paper

Texture/pattern composition, ink on paper

Texture/pattern composition, ink on paper

EXERCISE 14: Gathering Textures From What’s Around You

You can see how potent surface textures can be in the works shown by artists Jason Antaya and Peter Dellert.

This project is not about how to make certain textures but how to find them in your environment for use as inspiration for emphasizing texture in your work.

Textures are all around us in one form or another, and it’s worthwhile to take your sketchbook or camera outside the studio to see what you can find. When you really look, you can find some extraordinary textures out there like diamonds in the rough.

Using a simple digital camera, you can capture intriguing compositions by zooming in on textures themselves as shown by the examples here. The photos or sketches you make can be used for inspiration to translate into other media or used as the final artwork.

Recommended Materials

surface and materials of your choice

WHORL II

Peter Dellert

Sheet music and mixed media

WHAT YOU MISSED WHEN YOU BLINKED

Jason Antaya

Acrylic and collage on canvas

Natural organic copper

MOUNTAIN PASS

Joel Maze

Acrylic on paper

VALUE

The element of value is an emphasis on gradations of tone from light to dark in a composition. To focus on value itself, you want to create a dynamic contrast between light and dark in your work that translates into a dramatic mood or surreal atmosphere that’s hard to ignore.

To emphasize value, you often need to call upon tactics of exaggeration and overstatement to create the desired effect. You can see the intense impact of value and contrast in Bruce Fowler’s photograph of his installation piece and the mixed-media work by Tomas Vu shown here.

PROJECTION

Bruce Fowler

Motor oil, scale and digital projection

OPIUM DREAMS 1

Tomas Vu

Collage and watercolor

EXERCISE 15: Reaching for Contrast

I am borrowing from some previous projects that used a pattern as an armature to focus on value. The process is to first create a pattern as an outlined sketch and then work strong contrasts of light and dark into your composition to make value the dominant feature. Of course, there is no formula for the task of making a good composition; you just have to lay it out and proceed until you feel it is complete. The examples shown here achieve a powerful contrast of light and dark values that is very impressive.

Recommended Materials

• black-and-white mediums (acrylic paint, charcoal, or ink)
• substrate of your choice
  Value composition

UNTITLED #6

Madeleine Soloway

Monoprint with collage

Drawing emphasizing value

COLOR

Color is no doubt the stage star of all the basic elements, and there’s no question that everyone can relate to having heard the question, “What’s your favorite color?” And regardless of your reluctance to answer, you know you do have a favorite color, don’t you? By the way, my favorite color is an offbeat variation of Cobalt Blue.

Favorites aside, the list of artists whose works celebrate color can be best measured by the very, very few who you might argue should be excluded from all of us color lovers. Maybe you could say that the all-white paintings of Kazimir Malevich or the all-black paintings of Ad Reinhardt qualify, though they were actually using these noncolors to make an intellectual argument challenging our assumption that color must be part of art.

And then there’s possibly the abstract expressionist Franz Kline, most famous for his bold strokes of solidly black paint on a white background, but I’m sure he would argue that his black-and-white, broom-made brushstokes were a full spectrum of colors hidden in the vial of fast and passionate gestures.

We will be using color in practically every other project of this book; I’m only listing a couple of projects here where color itself is the prime subject and motivation to make something.

#4

Sean Greene

Acrylic on canvas

EXERCISE 16: The Interaction of Color

Josef Albers was one of the pioneers of color theory, studying the interaction of colors juxtaposed in close relation to one another—e.g., how a square of one color positioned inside a square of a contrasting color, inside of another contrasting color will change the visual illusion of all colors dramatically.

Using the basic concept of colors influencing one another, create color compositions, geometric or organic, emphasizing the interaction of colors that either harmonize or contrast with each other. As before, there are no models for what your final product should look like. The important factor is that you’re focused on color itself.

Recommended Materials

• any paint or dry color media
• substrate of your choice
  VALLEY

Paul Thomas

Enamel paint on board

Harmonious color composition in gouache

Contrasting colors study in watercolor

Contrasting colors study in tempera

Harmonious color composition in acrylic

EXERCISE 17: Mixing Colors From What’s Around You

Of course, color is all around us all the time and as you know, some colors are more interesting than others. This project is another quest to find ready-made color compositions in the environment that you can mine to extract particular colors to use as a base for an abstract composition.

The basic plan is to go out searching for rich colors that are part of places or things you see. For example, it’s not difficult to find beautiful colors in a bouquet of flowers or the array of colors you see when gazing at a sunset, and this type of subject is fine to use for this project. However, you can make this a more interesting hunt if you try to find colors in unlikely, less pretty places. The example here features a precariously balanced pile of laundry bags I photographed on a back street in Ecuador, which has a full palette of colors to offer (this could also be a source for a texture or line study as well).

You can conduct your search using a camera or a sketchbook, but keep in mind that the primary purpose of this first phase is to seek out colors and not necessarily make an artful photograph or finished painting in your sketchbook.

Once you have six to twelve sketches or photos, pick out the particular colors you think are the most interesting. Mix those colors as separate samples like a color chart and set them aside.

The job from here is to use the colors you mined from your observations to compose a group of abstract works whose palette is taken from your sketches and photographs.

Recommended Materials

• camera or sketch pad
• any medium you like
  Multicolored laundry bags

Color composition from laundry bag photo in watercolor

Color composition from laundry bag photo in acrylic

Readymades and Found Objects — Who Needs an Art Store Anyway?

The gift that Marcel Duchamp and other notable artists gave us is the fact that you can use anything and everything you find in the woods, on a city street or in the corner hardware store to make art, and you no longer have to second-guess whether that’s an acceptable approach to art making. Duchamp was the first artist to designate an ordinary utilitarian object as a work of art simply by selecting it and putting it in an art gallery. Duchamp coined the term readymade for such infamous artworks as Hat Rack, Bottle Rack and Bicycle Wheel. His infamous Fountain urinal, signed R. Mutt 1917, was the kicker that sent the art world over the edge of uncharted territory. By the way, R. Mutt was the name of a plumber that Duchamp found in a phone directory.

Duchamp’s ready-made magic wand transformed mundane, everyday things into art simply at the behest of the artist, and that revolutionary gesture challenged long-held aesthetic principles that art is strictly confined to things of great beauty and splendor.

Indeed, Duchamp consciously intended to test the limits of what could be considered art as early as 1912, and that battle cry burst through the fortress gates protecting high art from the riffraff of everything else in the world. By now we know that Duchamp, and legions of artists past and present, took up the call to make use of readymades, found objects and anything they could get their hands on to make inventive and intriguing works of art without bothering to get permission from art critics, historians or the ever-vigilant Art Police.

The projects in this section encourage you to take advantage of this artistic license to make art out of whatever you find that inspires you, without fear that it’s unacceptable to do so. I divided this section into two projects: one that emphasizes finding two-dimensional surfaces that inspire you, and another that works with reconfiguring three-dimensional everyday objects into new art forms.

EXERCISE 18: Upgrading the Ordinary and Everyday

Found object sculptor Peter Dellert says it this way: “I’ve been a collector all my life and even now when I start a collection I have no idea what it will be for. I am just drawn to the objects, be they cast-off car parts, window weights, tin cans, old atlases, sheet music or scraps from my day job as a cabinetmaker. And although I have no immediate use for them, I truly believe that one day I will need them, find a use for them and be fulfilled in doing so.”

The problem for Peter and other like-minded artists is that they collect things they already think have an aesthetic beauty, albeit from age and decay in many cases, and one doesn’t want to necessarily do too much to them and compete with the qualities that attracted him in the first place.

Therefore, the task in this project is to find surfaces around you that have their own intrinsic beauty and combine them with your own, subtle techniques of painting, drawing or mixed media that will lead to the final composition.

I suggest the following variations to create artworks inspired by surfaces you find almost anywhere.

Collect flat pieces of paper, metal, wood and other two-dimensional materials to work on directly. For example, you can use an old map you find that has a rich surface comprised of text, color and linear textures that you can work into with any number of materials to transform it into your own composition such as Marsha Westfield did in her mixed-media adaptation of a timeworn French map.

Consider using pencil sketches and photography as a means for appropriating ready-made surface ideas for your abstract works as seen in the charcoal renderings of Carolyn Lyons Horan in the next chapter on realism and abstraction.

The advent of digital photography has made it much easier to use your camera or smartphone, and less cumbersome than toting sketch materials around, so you can quickly record subjects whenever they come up. Readymade subjects like graffiti and surfaces of all kinds are there for your handy camera to record.

Recommended Materials

surface and materials of your choice

GATE II

Peter Dellert

Found objects and mixed media

LANDSCAPE 11

Marsha Westfield

Mixed media on paper

Tree bark

EXERCISE 19: Find a Readymade and Put It in a Collage

Collage and assemblage are ideal vehicles to host readymades and found objects of any kind. Janet Stupak and I have collected damaged old books from the trash and thrift shops for a long time in order to repurpose them for our art. In Janet’s Picasso you see the recycled remnants of a water-damaged copy of a book on Picasso, combined with the spines of other discarded books that make up her abstract/realistic collage. Recycling discarded objects like this is a side benefit of found-object art.

Recommended Materials

surface and materials of your choice

PICASSO

Janet Stupak

Collage on panel

EXERCISE 20: Taken out of Context

Christopher Willingham makes use of some of the simplest readymades you can think of—grocery store crackers and linguini—to make an extraordinary sculpture that is witty, provocative and poignant at the same time. Though there’s no particular message intended here, this abstract sculpture looks like a ceremonial artifact that was unearthed in an ancient cave. All the more interesting when you look closely and discover that it’s not made of treasures like gold and silver, but humble ingredients taken off the family dinner table. Consequently, this project is a challenge to find readymades in commercial locations that you can adapt for abstract art.

Recommended Materials

surface and materials of your choice

COMPOSITION 88

Christopher Willingham

String, crackers and linguini

EXERCISE 21: A Chair Is a Chair Is a Chair

This project, designed by artist Christopher Nelson, involves transforming an ordinary, found-object chair into an abstract sculpture. The chair has been a practical necessity throughout human history. The evolution of its design is as diverse as the clothes worn from the distant past to the present day. Though chairs are made to be comfortable places to sit, many artists and designers have made their name through their revolutionary ideas that bring together a beautiful form with masterful construction of a new, yet unforeseen, outcome.

The goal of this project is to deconstruct a commonplace chair and remake it into a dynamic piece of sculpture. First, find a wooden or plastic chair at a tag sale or secondhand store or find one on the street for free. Try to find a chair with some characteristic shapes, contours, colors or textures that appeal to you. Make some observations of this chair.

Is it a good subject because it’s a plain and ordinary chair lacking character on first observation? Is it more functional, more practical or more decorative? Where was this chair meant to be used? Next, think of how you can disassemble this chair and make it nonfunctional. How can you change this chair and give it an artistic and expressive form?

Start by taking the chair apart. Obviously, do this with safety in mind, but also do this slowly as you may want to keep some main components as they are. Once you’ve removed the parts you want to change, begin reconstructing the chair using artistic considerations of composition and form dynamics as the primary goals. Try to use the interesting preexisting qualities of the chair and incorporate them into your new design. Keep reworking the chair until you’ve completely transformed it from an everyday object you could to sit on into something you take pleasure in looking at.

Questions and Answers

Q. Can you use more than one chair?

A. Of course.

Q. Can you add other objects to the chair?

A. Of course.

Q. Can you deconstruct a different object like a bicycle or an old typewriter?

A. Of course. And the answer to any other like questions is “Of course!”

Recommended Materials

• chair parts (wooden, plastic or metal chair recovered from the trash)
• tools such as screws, nails, glues, paints
• any other materials
  WALL CHAIR

student project

Wood and paint

TRAP CHAIR

student project

Wood and paint

CHAPTER TWO

Learning from Alternate Realities, Philosophers and Art History

Sometimes called “the father of contemporary art,” Paul Cézanne was one of the first artists to see the painting developing under his brush as more than just a means to an end—the end being a faithful rendering of the subject he was observing. This is not to say that Cézanne discovered how to make nature look abstract in his paintings, as that was never his intent. In fact, he wasn’t consciously trying to change the way nature looked in his work at all. Rather, he was focused on what the painting itself needed to be—an artwork inspired by nature yet not obligated to simply recreate her straightforward appearances.

To do that, he first had to relinquish the bonds of commitment to rendering what he saw in the natural world exactly how it appeared.

The second idea he came upon was to pay more attention to the painting itself in order to translate his impressions of nature into a new entity that was evolving and changing as if it had its own voice demanding to be heard. That change—to focus attention on the compositional needs of the artwork itself—was a radical departure from what any other artist of his time was doing, and it was the precursor to generations of artists who followed his lead.

Abstract art has been with us in one form or another for almost a century now and has proved to be not only a long-standing crux of cultural debate but a self-renewing, vital tradition of creativity. We know that it works, even if we’re still not sure why that’s so or exactly what to make of that fact. —Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock

THE BEND IN THE ROAD

Paul Cezanne

Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

During a discussion concerning Cézanne and the question “What is real and what is abstract in art?”, a former professor of mine suggested that, if I wasn’t sure about the difference between real and abstract, I might want to try to take a bite out of a Cézanne apple to see how it tastes.

Naturally, you can’t take a bite of a Cézanne apple unless you’d like a mouthful of very bitter, dried-up paint, not to mention being tossed in jail.

The fact is, a painting of an apple, or a picture of anything else for that matter, is born to the mastery of artistic magicians who can create the illusion of a three-dimensional reality on a two-dimensional surface. The irony is that this long tradition of creating the illusion of real things in the world on a piece of paper or stretched canvas is its own form of abstraction universally practiced by all artists—painters, sculptors and even photographers—regardless of their objectives to accurately depict things in the visible world. It may be art, but it’s always an abstracted invention by an artist interpreting the real world as she sees it.

Nevertheless, I’m not from the elitist camp that says, “If you can find something recognizable in a composition—usually a face or something more provocative—it’s not a pure abstraction.” After all, if astrologers, some of the world’s early abstract thinkers, can draw a charioteer riding behind three wild stallions by connecting the points of seven distant stars, we owe a debt to our artistic imagination as the real driving force of human creativity.

I’m also not a big fan of the art audience that declares, “Picasso had earned the right to paint abstractly since he was a master of realism to begin with.” Picasso himself disputed this idea saying that he wished he had come to know his inner-child spirit of bold creativity sooner than he did in his abstract works. That said, I don’t want to lecture away the fascinating connections that exist between realism and abstraction, which offer so many opportunities to excite your instincts to try new artistic horizons.

What I do want to do is exploit this collision of contrasts as an avenue to explore the creative possibilities that can include elements of both realist and abstract artistic traditions.

Though I haven’t taken a poll, I would wager that there are more artists working now who would agree with the premise that their art is both realistic and abstract. In fact, I think there’s more interest today in making art that is kind of a bilingual expression of the desire to span both worlds.

I want to emphasize that you shouldn’t think of these projects as a way to make something in the world just look abstract. That’s my complaint about many other how-to books on abstract art—that they’re too focused on a narrow stereotype for what abstract art typically looks like.

By contrast, I want you to see the endless variety of possibilities for what your abstract work can look like, and most of that variety comes directly from your own unique personality and how you express what you see in the environment around you.

Still life composition

Realism and Abstraction — The Odd Bedfellows

The projects in this section challenge you to base your abstract drawing, painting, collage, etc. on an observed figure, still life or landscape viewed from different perspectives.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, J.M.W. Turner for short (1775–1851), was, in my mind, one of the most inspiring and influential abstract artists in the history of painting. Turner was a master realist, a classical landscape painter, in his day. That is, until he discovered the newest technology of the early nineteenth century—the medium of watercolor. Not only did watercolor free Turner to sketch and record nature without worrying about oils not drying in a timely fashion, watercolors gave him the ability to spontaneously record his impressions of sunlit scenes in fleeting moments of time that eventually dubbed him “the painter of light.”

Beyond the fact that his work proved to be an important influence on Impressionists many years later, Turner’s watercolors cut to the core of what it means to abstractly interpret nature as a living, breathing entity, right down to reading the full-sensory qualities of temperature, smell, touch and even taste in a few effortless brushstrokes.

I don’t think that Turner ever fully understood the implications of the transformation he had undergone as an artist, nor was he self-consciously invested in taking a place in art history as a rebel proclaiming to be the inventor of a new kind of art. Simply put, Turner’s passion was to reach under the surface of things to find another level of consciousness he could only access through painting. John Cage once identified this process of abstraction saying, “I prefer to interpret nature in her manner of operation rather than her outward appearances.”

The irony is that Turner is a unique example of a “naïve” artist whose career spiraled in reverse gear. He begins as a child prodigy with incredible technical skills to render and illustrate classical iconography only to abandon that craft once he saw the opportunities to capture the abstract essence of nature by letting go, painting what he felt and sensed in his gut. Inspirational indeed!

HEIDELBERG, C. 1846

Joseph Mallord William Turner

Watercolor, pen and ink on paper

Courtesy of Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh/The Bridgeman

Art Library

EXERCISE 22: Sharing the Spotlight

When working from observed subject matter, the central idea is to see beyond the name of what you’re looking at—whether it’s a still life, a figure or a building—to find the qualities you want to dramatize and transform. This process of observation is similar to projects in the first chapter, which centered on making use of basic elements where you are accentuating a color, line, shape, form, value or texture that you want to bring to the forefront.

In other words, if you’re looking at a subject such as a tree, you want to see that tree through the lens of these basic elements, rather than see it as a static object you already have an icon for in your head.

This is a very different kind of observation that needs to come from your art brain, looking for the uniquely aesthetic elements that comprise the tree and not your cosmopolitan brain just seeking a tree for shade on a hot day.

Therefore, you need to train your art brain to see more clearly, to look deeper at the world for the benefit of any realistic or abstract art objectives you may have.

This first project centers on training your eye to look close-up at segments of the world from different perspectives to see the potential for creating abstract art hidden from casual observations. To do this, select an object to zoom in on, taking a macro view of what you see to use as your subject.

For example, Tyler Vouros’s composition of a sunflower uses a close-up view to transform his observation into a dramatic abstract version of the object. In addition to a zoomed-in view, part of the drama here comes from high-contrast black and white charcoal in place of color. The result is an intriguing marriage of the real thing he’s looking at and the dramatic effects of the close-up view and stark contrast. This is realism and abstraction working together as equal partners.

This process of zooming in on something aids in the process of seeing that something differently, and that’s the main objective of this exercise. There are many ways to abstractly transform what you see simply by looking at the world from your art brain’s perspective.

Note how the sunflower and seashell compositions were inspired by taking a close-up view of the subject. Digital photography and smart phone technology have made it possible to always have a camera with you, ready to capture a scene on the spur of the moment. Using a camera is the best way to capture fleeting moments where light and shadow change the look of a scene over time or when studying moving cloud formations and changing weather. Another advantage of using a camera is that you can take many photos in a short period of time (that’s more difficult to sketch by hand). By the way, selfies don’t count for this project.

Recommended Materials

• camera or sketch pad
• materials of your choice
  LEVIATHAN

Tyler Vouros

Charcoal and water on paper

Nature’s own abstract art

SEASHELL MACRO COMPOSITION

Watercolor on paper

EXERCISE 23: Good Subjects Are Everywhere — Really!

A typical creative block faced by both representational and abstract artists alike is the quest to find an “interesting subject” to draw, paint, sculpt and so on, that will ensure a good outcome. After you’ve painted wine bottles and grapes or a sunset in Cadmium Orange and Yellow for the one-hundredth time or you’ve made yet another Pollock-esque drip work or minimal, one-color composition, they kind of lose their appeal, don’t they?

My view is that there is no such thing as an intrinsically wonderful subject with a monopoly on personal satisfaction and creative significance when making art.

So what do you do to break this habit of relying on traditional subject matter? When you’re stuck looking for inspiration, simply look around you to see the potential in ordinary objects or parts of your environment. A key factor in this approach is enlisting the help of your innate curiosity. Nothing is boring to the artist who practices responding to what he sees with a fully engaged imagination.

If the subject isn’t coming to life in front of you, take the creative challenge to make it more interesting than it appears. After all, the idea to make reality more interesting is the true calling for all artists.

There are many approaches to take with this project. To begin with you must look for something different than whatever you’re used to drawing or painting. I recommend looking up around the ceiling or down near the ground rather than searching at eye level. Eye level is OK as long as you don’t compose a still life of familiar objects you’re already comfortable drawing. (This project works better out of your comfort zone.)

Remember, you’re looking for new ideas in commonplace settings. You can make this into an art scavenger hunt by looking for accidental compositions that no one else is paying attention to. I found an interesting composition of light fixtures when I looked up in a building that was being renovated. While on a walk in the woods I came upon a great composition of tree roots and dried leaves that was inspiring.

Of course, you could have a rich photo itself be the final artwork as it combines realism and abstraction in a unique way just as it is. You could also transform the photo in an editing program as I did, using the Threshold function to create a high-contrast pattern of textures and rhythm of lines. This is another method of extracting abstract forms from the realistic observation.

I had my students go into a downtown area and make sketches from what they saw in store windows. Here you have a treasure trove of interesting objects, shapes, colors and textures that have already been arranged for you by someone who thought they were just making an interesting display to attract customers.

Once you see something interesting, start making quick thumbnail drawings with line only or take a quick picture, but keep it simple. Don’t start working into anything until you’ve got at least ten to twenty sketches with potential to take further.

If you prefer, you can always use a digital camera or smart phone as a quick way to record places or objects of interest, rather than drawing. You would then use the photos to draw or paint from later.

Once you have your sketches, look through them for places to start and get going on your drawing, painting or sculpture from there.

Recommended Materials

• copy paper or a digital camera for sketches
• HB or B pencils
• your choice of mediums and techniques
  Sketching store windows

Tree root photo

High-contrast rendering of tree root photo

Cable TV wires composition

Exit composition photo

UNTITLED (BASED ON CABLE TV WIRES)

James Presnell and Amber Krawczyk

Charcoal, pastel and erasers

EXERCISE 24: Meet the Interchangeables

This project shows you how to use both photography and drawing or painting to represent abstract compositions originating from the same subject matter. Carolyn Horan did this by first photographing a group of shadows on the ground, a form of abstraction created naturally. She then created an abstract charcoal composition, which was an interpretation of the shadows she had photographed earlier.

Carolyn’s drawing is fairly true to the photograph she took since she faithfully recorded the shapes, values and textures she saw in the camera’s image. The irony is that the photograph itself reads as an abstraction because there’s very little there to reveal that this is sunlight peering through leaves, again demonstrating how realism and abstraction can be interchangeable aspects of the same thing.

There are several ways you can approach this project, including finding your own abstract organic form to photograph and then using it as a source for a composition in another medium, or reverse the process and create an abstract drawing or painting and search your natural surroundings to photograph something in nature that looks similar to the composition you made earlier.

Recommended Materials

your choice of mediums and techniques

LIFE AND LIMB

Carolyn Lyons Horan

Photograph

LIFE AND LIMB

Carolyn Lyons Horan

Charcoal on paper

EXERCISE 25: Taking a Broad View — Landscapes, Seascapes, Cityscapes and More

Eric Aho religiously paints and sketches outdoors, and his compositions have developed over the years from more realistic renderings to much more abstract compositions as a kind of natural evolution he didn’t foresee. Eric is not alone in his love of working on the edges of both realism and abstraction. There are many well-known artists—J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, Georgia O’Keeffe, to name a few—who would paint and draw directly from observed nature, extracting something of the essence of what they saw into a newly created abstract image.

When many of us make art, we are in our studio—albeit in our attic, basement or at a kitchen table—hibernating there even when the weather is ideal to go outside. I’m sure many realist painters follow the long-standing tradition of plein air painting and drawing by going out into the elements, but you’re unlikely to see many artists these days who are making nonrepresentational images by braving the elements to find and observe their subjects outdoors.

I had a student in an advanced painting class who was struggling to paint a seascape from memory. He said he had lived near the ocean all his life and felt he should have been able to make a more accurate depiction of the sea he knows than the one he was churning out. When I asked him if he had actually gone out and sketched or painted the ocean much, he said, “No.” To me this is the equivalent of assuming you should be able to play golf because you lived next to a golf course. Clearly, you can’t expect to know a subject through some process of osmosis; you have to study it to gain knowledge.

As with the last project, you need to inform your art brain by physically and mentally looking at your subject to retain as much as you can about what you see. And since those artists who prefer to work abstractly are among the most handicapped for their lack of experience working directly on location, I highly recommend getting yourself outside as soon as possible.

You may get more food for thought if you are searching for gritty, unusual scenes to work from rather than those that are pretty. One of the advantages of working with cityscapes is that there are plenty of tattered facades of old buildings, back-alley trash and junkyard chaos to work from that you won’t find in a more pristine landscape.

By the way, it isn’t necessarily better to make finished works outdoors in order to earn your art merit badge for getting it done in one sitting. Artist Charles Burchfield famously went out in Buffalo, New York, blizzards and painted until he and his brushes were frozen and snowflakes created ghosts in his watercolors—a true Olympian of plein air painting!

While completing your work on-site is a good ambition, I recommend that you simply make a habit of sketching outside as a way to expand your artistic vocabulary for what’s out there to use in your art.

Outdoor landscape painting became popular with the advent of portable media like charcoal, graphite and watercolors starting in the early eighteenth century. Today you have options to use acrylic paints, watercolors, water-based oils and dry media such as pastels, colored pencils and oil bars, allowing you to create your composition on the spot if that’s what you wish to do.

Recommended Materials

your choice of mediums and techniques

MOUNTAIN

Eric Aho

Oil on canvas

Eric Aho religiously paints and sketches outdoors, and his compositions have developed over the years from more realistic renderings to much more abstract compositions as a kind of natural evolution he didn’t foresee. Eric is not alone in his love of working on the edges of both realism and abstraction. There are many well-known artists—J.M.W. Turner, Claude Monet, Georgia O’Keeffe, to name a few—who would paint and draw directly from observed nature, extracting something of the essence of what they saw into a newly created abstract image.

When many of us make art, we are in our studio—albeit in our attic, basement or at a kitchen table—hibernating there even when the weather is ideal to go outside. I’m sure many realist painters follow the long-standing tradition of plein air painting and drawing by going out into the elements, but you’re unlikely to see many artists these days who are making nonrepresentational images by braving the elements to find and observe their subjects outdoors.

I had a student in an advanced painting class who was struggling to paint a seascape from memory. He said he had lived near the ocean all his life and felt he should have been able to make a more accurate depiction of the sea he knows than the one he was churning out. When I asked him if he had actually gone out and sketched or painted the ocean much, he said, “No.” To me this is the equivalent of assuming you should be able to play golf because you lived next to a golf course. Clearly, you can’t expect to know a subject through some process of osmosis; you have to study it to gain knowledge.

As with the last project, you need to inform your art brain by physically and mentally looking at your subject to retain as much as you can about what you see. And since those artists who prefer to work abstractly are among the most handicapped for their lack of experience working directly on location, I highly recommend getting yourself outside as soon as possible.

You may get more food for thought if you are searching for gritty, unusual scenes to work from rather than those that are pretty. One of the advantages of working with cityscapes is that there are plenty of tattered facades of old buildings, back-alley trash and junkyard chaos to work from that you won’t find in a more pristine landscape.

By the way, it isn’t necessarily better to make finished works outdoors in order to earn your art merit badge for getting it done in one sitting. Artist Charles Burchfield famously went out in Buffalo, New York, blizzards and painted until he and his brushes were frozen and snowflakes created ghosts in his watercolors—a true Olympian of plein air painting!

While completing your work on-site is a good ambition, I recommend that you simply make a habit of sketching outside as a way to expand your artistic vocabulary for what’s out there to use in your art.

Outdoor landscape painting became popular with the advent of portable media like charcoal, graphite and watercolors starting in the early eighteenth century. Today you have options to use acrylic paints, watercolors, water-based oils and dry media such as pastels, colored pencils and oil bars, allowing you to create your composition on the spot if that’s what you wish to do.

UNTITLED LANDSCAPE

Joanne Holtje

Acrylic on canvas

YELLOW MOUNTAIN III

Yuan Zou

Oil on canvas

EXERCISE 26: Earthworks — Working Hand in Hand With Nature

There’s a tradition of artists working directly in the open landscape that started back in the late 1960s by pioneers such as Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson. Though their intentions were more about testing the boundaries of art beyond the gallery walls, they also demonstrated the possibilities for creating a new abstract art form that combined organic and inorganic elements introduced into the environment, changing our perception of a scene from picturesque to something abstractly surreal.

Chris Nelson’s Inside Out earthwork is a good example of how the temporary introduction of a polypropylene rope suspended over a granite quarry, with no practical function, makes a dramatic change in how we think about what we see. The work exists as an event during the time it’s up and with photo documentation once the rope is removed. The resulting artwork is a kind of collaboration between the artist and Mother Nature. There’s lots of room to explore the vast opportunities to partner with natural elements to create abstract art yourself.

Recommended Materials

your choice of mediums and techniques

INSIDE OUT

Chris Nelson

Polypropylene rope, water and granite quarry

EXERCISE 27: Tell Me What You See

I don’t know whether I invented this project myself or I heard something like it that a colleague mentioned to me, but it’s definitely a fun and fascinating exercise that requires two people cooperating with one another to make an abstract composition.

Two people sit or stand back-to-back, one having a sketch pad and a box of crayons, and the other talking out loud about what she sees from her opposite vantage point.

The describer can say only what she sees in terms of the basic elements—line, shape, color, texture, value and form (from chapter one)—without using the names of things she sees in the landscape—rocks, grass, trees, people, dogs, etc. The describer can use emotional inflections and adjectives to describe what she sees such as turbulent lines, bright colors, soft shapes and the like, as long as she doesn’t say what something is.

The drawer must use his crayons and imagination to render what the describer is saying without resorting to using any symbols, words or images of things in his abstract picture.

Each partner takes a turn playing the role of the describer or the drawer, and there is no time limit assigned to switch places.

I know this sounds a lot like the classic game show Password, but in this case there is no correct answer to the question, so what should the resulting drawing look like? That’s what makes this project so creative and fun to do!

Recommended Materials

• box of crayons
• sketchbook
  Describe what you see…

Do It Your Way — Taking Advantage of Art History

There are so many isms in the history of abstract painting it’s enough to make you dizzy. Some of the most noted are: Impressionism (c. 1870–1890), Postimpressionism (c. 1885–1905), Fauvism (c. 1905–1910), German Expressionism (c. 1905–1925), Cubism (c. 1907–1915), Futurism (c. 1909–1914), Suprematism (c. 1915–1925), Constructivism (c. 1913–1930), Dadaism (c. 1916–1922), Surrealism (c. 1924–1939), Abstract Expressionism (c. 1946–1956) and Minimalism (1969–). I’m sure that historians would argue for several other modern isms before, in between and after these benchmarks that are part of the legacy in the evolution of abstract art.

Each of these movements has some distinct characteristics making it unique from the others, but I’m more interested in the base philosophy tying them together than I am in their relative differences.

The strongest example of the underlying unity in abstract art is the fact that the act of making abstract art is itself an affirmation of an artist’s ability to think and imagine beyond the social and political norms that would confine us to a more boxed-in world that sets limits on what’s acceptable in art.

The following projects borrow ideas from some of the richest abstract art movements, which have plenty more room to expand on. The movements I selected are Impressionism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism.

ROUEN CATHEDRAL

Claude Monet

Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

IMPRESSIONISM

The Impressionists searched for a more exact analysis of the effects of color and light in nature. They sought to capture the atmosphere of a particular time of day or the effects of different weather conditions. They often worked outdoors and applied their paint in small brightly colored strokes, which meant sacrificing much of the outline and detail of their subject.

Impressionism abandoned the conventional idea that the color of an object’s shadow was comprised of that object’s color with some brown or black added.

Instead, the Impressionists enriched their colors with the idea that a shadow is broken up with dashes of the object’s complementary color.

Among the most important Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste-Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Postimpressionism was not a particular style of painting; it was the collective title given to the works of a few independent artists at the end of the nineteenth century. The Postimpressionists rebelled against the limitations of Impressionism to develop a range of personal styles that influenced the development of art in the twentieth century. The major artists associated with Postimpressionism were Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Georges Seurat.

VENUS

Dean Nimmer

Acrylic on canvas

EXERCISE 28: Recording Your Impressions

The Impressionists were devoted to observing nature from a unique perspective, and it is that selective eye on nature that made their visions unique. The Impressionists didn’t consider themselves to be abstract artists. To the contrary, they were devotees of painting the glory of nature in all her splendor.

The thing that set them apart was how they applied their selective eye, choosing to emphasize qualities of light over a multitude of other aspects of nature.

This project borrows from the Impressionists’ emphasis on the transformative qualities of sunlight and shadow—key elements in their art. The main emphasis of this project is to use qualities of extreme contrasts of light and shadow, along with an inventive color palette in your abstract compositions.

The simple subjects here are light and shadow and your goal is to emphasize how sunlight, or the lack of it, alters your perception of the world. You’re not trying to illustrate an Impressionistic style of picture making in this project. Rather, you are creating your own compositions emphasizing your subjective impressions of light and shadow filtered through a combination of your observation and imagination.

This exercise works best when done from direct observation outdoors by making sketches or taking pictures to gather ideas as we’ve done in previous projects. Though you can do this project strictly out of your head, it’s most helpful to have direct observation as a basis for your impressionistic compositions.

So go out and search for evidence of light affecting objects, structures or vistas that you can document or take note of, and develop your sketches into a variety of compositions in different media. Keep in mind that there is not one solution to this project and the more compositions you make, the better.

Recommended Materials

your choice of mediums and techniques

UNTITLED WATERCOLOR

Janet McCarthy

UNTITLED IMPRESSIONISTIC LIGHT STUDY

MOUNTAIN

Anne Rice

Watercolor on paper

CUBISM

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque invented Cubism around 1907, and it was the first abstract style of modern art. Cubist paintings ignore the traditions of perspective drawing and show you many views of a subject at one time.

The Cubists believed that the traditions of Western art had become exhausted, and to revitalize their work, they drew on the expressive energy of art from other cultures, particularly African art.

There are two distinct phases of the Cubist style: Analytical Cubism (pre-1912) and Synthetic Cubism (post-1912). Analytical cubism saw the artist analyze a subject from many different viewpoints and reconstruct it within a crude geometric framework. The overall effect was to create an image that evoked a sense of the subject as a fragmented form unified by the use of a subdued and limited palette of colors.

Around 1912 the styles of Picasso and Braque were becoming predictable. Their images had grown so similar that their paintings of this period are often difficult to tell apart. Their work was increasingly abstract and less recognizable as a figure, still life or landscape. In an attempt to revitalize the style, Picasso began to glue printed images from the real world onto the surface of his still lifes. Influenced by the introduction of bold and simple collage shapes, Synthetic Cubism moved away from the unified monochrome surfaces of Analytic Cubism to a more direct, colorful and decorative style.

Cubism influenced many other styles of modern art, including Expressionism, Futurism, Orphism, Vorticism, Suprematism, Constructivism and De Stijl. Other notable artists associated with Cubism were Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Louis Marcoussis and Marie Laurencin.

One little-known fact about Cubism is that it was the inspiration behind the fragmented views of earth, foliage, branches and grass that came to be known as camouflage, first used in World War I.

CUBIST CHAIR

Wood and paint

SHADOWS

David Poppie

Matchbooks collage on panel

EXERCISE 29: Working With a Fractured Reality

Cubism may be the most iconic art movement associated with the invention of abstract art since it caused such a stir when it was first shown in art galleries in the early nineteenth century.

Cubism was not as subtle a transformation of reality as Impressionism—boldly taking a picture apart and rearranging it into something that had no resemblance to what was thought of as reality. It was artistic blasphemy!

By today’s standards, Cubism seems pretty tame, but the idea of fragmenting an image to create a new abstract composition still has a lot of potential.

For this project, I’d like you to keep the following two parameters in mind to keep this project related to Cubism as distinct from other forms of painting and collage:

2. Your composition could pictorially represent a single subject, or multiple subjects, from many different viewpoints at the same time and reconstruct it within one geometric framework. This may be done as one flat picture painted with the ambiguous illusion of three-dimensional space that depicts different overlapping views at the same time.
3. You may approach the same general idea of representing multiple geometric views and conflicting ambiguous space by collaging different pieces of your own work together.
   Of course, I won’t be checking your work to see if your Cubist creation meets a litmus test, but do try to keep these suggestions in mind.

That still leaves a lot of open territory to consider what you want to do, but don’t just sit there and debate what Cubism is, just get going by making something!

This project, like many others in this book, can be a two-dimensional composition, a mixed-media work or constructed with three-dimensional materials.

Rather than using the standard newspaper and magazine cutouts to collage, I recommend that you take apart some of your own old drawings, paintings and photographs and recombine them into abstract images. The obvious reason is that your own work is more personally connected than pieces created by someone else.

The best resource for images to use for this project are artworks you’ve made that were either unfinished or discarded because you didn’t like them. Once you’ve located several of your own compositions that you’re willing to sacrifice for this project, start cutting or tearing up the images and make a pile of the ones that look most interesting.

Recommended Materials

your choice of mediums and techniques

UNTITLED

Angela McGuire

Acrylic on canvas

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM

Abstract Expressionism was the first great American avant-garde art movement. It began shortly after World War II in the late 1940s and flourished in the 1950s and 1960s The roots of Abstract Expressionism go back to the original master, Wassily Kandinsky, who was the first well-known artist to declare that his paintings were centered in his inner world and not related to painting the visible aspects of nature. Other influences came from the Cubists, Futurists and particularly Surrealists, who opened new, unexplored horizons in art, stimulated by the movement to break out of the realist conventions of the day.

Perhaps the best-known Abstract Expressionist was Jackson Pollock because of his dramatic personality on the canvas and in the public eye. His dripping and spattering painting techniques brought him fame as the master of pure emotional expression in art.

The movement can be more or less divided into two groups: Action Painting, typified by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Philip Guston, who stressed the physical action involved in painting; and Color Field Painting, practiced by Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Kenneth Noland among others, were primarily concerned with exploring the effects of pure color on a canvas.

I took the preceding list off the Internet, and it reads like the stereotyped boy’s club that dominates the Who’s Who in art history. Not that the recognition of these male artists is unwarranted, but you have to dig down pretty far to see that artists like Louise Bourgeois, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell were making equally provocative art right alongside their male counterparts.

Probably the most egregious example of a woman artist being relegated to art history footnotes is Lee Krasner, wife of Jackson Pollock, whose own potent paintings were way ahead of the curve for Abstract Expressionist innovators. We now know that Krasner was a significant influence on Pollock himself, and she likely made the first free-form drip paintings that sparked Pollock’s grand gestures and made such a lasting impression on the art world.

I don’t make mention of these facts to chide historians for overlooking women artists or just to sound politically correct. I’m using that clear example of art history prejudice to point out that there is no gender, no race, no group of art manifestos that owns the keys to what’s most important and relevant in the realm of making art.

What is most relevant is that the choice to make art is open to absolutely everyone without exception, and the politics of who’s best at it is a trivial pursuit that’s a distraction from taking up your own opportunities to make art in a way that’s meaningful to you.

There are “elements of nature” in my work, but not in the sense of birds and trees and water. When I say “nature” I might mean energy, motion, everything that’s happening in and around me. That’s what I mean by nature. — Lee Krasner quoted by Gail Levin, Lee Krasner: A Biography

UNTITLED, C. 1951

Lee Krasner

Oil on canvas

Courtesy of Bridgeman Art Library and the Artists Rights Society

EXERCISE 30: Excited Emotions and Unrestrained Passion in Paint

This is a tough subject to make into a project because it’s somewhat like telling a would-be comedian to go on stage and be funny! Just saying it doesn’t necessarily work. So my main direction to you is to trust your intuition; start a composition and keep going.

It’s not clear just by looking at the examples I’ve included with this project that they are Abstract Expressionist artworks. Only the artist really knows whether he is working strictly from gut instincts. You have to assume those who view your work may or may not get that; it goes with the territory.

This is also a project that could lead you to think that Abstract Expressionism means a lot of dripping, pouring and generally frantic-looking marks are all over the place. While that can be true, many kinds of compositions that take many different forms, originate from a deeply emotional source.

The action painting project that I described in chapter one under Icebreakers and Warm-Ups, is a good specific way to work spontaneously without over-thinking what you are making.

Artist Barbara Moody says it this way: “The elements of unpredictability and surprise are the driving forces in my abstract work. I’m drawn to contrasts between density and airiness, spontaneity and deliberateness, transparency and opacity, hints of representation and abstraction, and between what just occurred and what will happen next. The automatic drawing process feels all-encompassing to me, like being inside of the work itself.”

Recommended Materials

your choice of mediums and techniques

SMALL PAINTING #2

Timothy Hawkesworth

Oil on canvas

STAR

Gregory Amenoff

Oil on panel

Courtesy of the artist and Alexandre Gallery, NYC

Creative Meditations — The Tao of Abstract Art

Christopher Willingham, Adjunct Professor of Art, Holyoke Community College, created the haiku and koan projects in this section.

The intention of directed contemplation in Eastern meditation is to accept the nature of impermanence and change. The purpose of meditative practice is to recognize knowledge as emerging from emptiness, and that inspiration and insight can occur when we silently surrender ourselves to simply what is. Without accepting what is, we attach to distractions and often misplace the possibility of transformation—an intuitive, inward understanding of the process of life itself.

In art we can apply these principles to the creative process. This is useful because it helps us get out of our own way as we make the work. This approach is open, intuitive and spontaneous and is about discovering the image or object as it emerges and develops moment to moment.

What is most required is curiosity, trust in one’s own inner resources and a willingness to recognize and respond to what happens in the present-tense act of making art. The results can be uniquely fresh, inspired and personal.

The captivating world of the subconscious mind and all we know of the subterranean depths of our dreams are fertile grounds for making abstract art. The hitch is that we tend to spend so much wasted time debating what is real and what is pure fantasy that we miss the creative opportunities afforded by letting go of our personal comfort zones. In order to change that stigma from an obstacle to an opportunity, this section challenges you to find inspiration in the fact that your subjective internal visions, dreams and meditations can have a great, positive influence on your abilities to create beyond the physical world around you.

The public has been misled into believing that art is an invention, a creation from nothing by a solitary genius working in a vacuum. Art, like life, which it reflects, is continuity. For a painter the true meaning of painting is in the act of painting. —Alexander Liberman, The Artist in His Studio

HAIKU POEM PROJECT

By three students

Linocut and mixed media

TAO MURAL

Christopher Willingham

Charcoal and tape

EXERCISE 31: Haiku Poetry Drawings and Paintings

The exercises here use haiku poems as inspiration to evoke drawings and paintings from your interpretations of the poetic verse.

Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry using a set of three lines that follow a pattern of 5/7/5 syllables. Subjects of haiku poems are often events, seasons and creatures of the natural world that reflect a distinctive Zen and Buddhist sensibility. The haiku poet records experience by using a meditative thought process that leaves the mind open to subconscious influences.

This intuitive writing process is akin to the same form of open imagination visual artists use to create their work. Use your subconscious imagination to interpret haiku poems visually.

You may choose one of the following haiku poems to serve as an inspiration for your drawing or painting, use another haiku or poem by someone else or write your own haiku for this project.

You are not trying to illustrate the landscape, things or ideas mentioned in the poem. Rather, use the sounds and sensory impressions you receive and imagine from reading the poem as your inspiration. Remember, too, that there is no right way to interpret a poem, and your artwork can and should be different from another artist using the same poem as inspiration.

Faceless, just numbered

Lone pixel in the bitmap—

I, anonymous. —Alexey Andeyev

Behold the ego

Set in glowing emptiness

On the edge of time —Noel Kaufmann

The form of the formless,

The image of the imageless . . .

Stand before it and there is no beginning.

Follow it and there is no end. —Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching

Over the wintry

forest, winds howl in rage

with no leaves to blow. —Natsume Soseki

Recommended Materials

• your choice of mediums and techniques
• optional: water-based or oil paints, sumi brushes, India ink, charcoal and pastels
  HAIKU

Velma Magill

Watercolor on rice paper

HAIKU POEM BY NATSUME SOSEKI

Interpretation by Janet Stupak

Acrylic on paper

EXERCISE 32: Original Face: Koan Portraits Project by Christopher Willingham

A koan is a picture, story, dialogue, statement or question in (Zen) Buddhist practice that is a vehicle for meditation and creative invention. Koan consists of elements that contradict or are inaccessible to a rational understanding of the world, but that encourage intuitive contemplation beyond the surface of what we see.

Often the purpose of the koan is to jolt the mind into a new state of awareness by confounding conventional thoughts and interpretations of the mundane experience of our environment.

One well-known koan is the Original Face, which takes the form of the question, “What did your face look like before your parents were born?” This question invites us to recognize essence as the empty nature of reality—an essential emptiness that consists of all potential beyond any particulars of social, cultural, physical or psychological understandings of self, body and mind. This cultivated understanding of an essence that is beyond (and prior to) form and material manifestation is common to Zen, Buddhist and Taoist teaching and practice.

As an artistic meditation, we will use this question to reconsider our self-perceptions in the form of a self-portrait series.

Make four self-portrait drawings, using the koan of the Original Face to help you focus in the act of this artistic meditation. Let the question be a vehicle for contemplation to help you respond intuitively in the process of making these drawings. You will attempt to recognize and express the essence of your Original Face by studying yourself in four reflections to follow.

For this project, you may use any support surface and media you prefer, and they need not be the same for each portrait. Note that you may use mediums such as photography for your koan portrait as well as any drawing or painting techniques.

Recommended Materials

your choice of mediums and techniques

The Face of Another

Contemplate the face of another person who sits before you. See if you can find your Original Face reflected in his features. Draw your self-portrait while looking at him.

UNTITLED KOAN PORTRAIT

The Face of Body

Contemplate your reflection in a mirror. Try to quiet your thoughts and hold the koan of the Original Face in your mind. Draw yourself.

UNTITLED KOAN PORTRAIT

The Face of Mind

Contemplate the blank surface on which you will draw your self-portrait. Try to sit quietly and meditate on the emptiness of the surface while imagining your Original Face. Draw your self-portrait from your mind and observe the manifestations on the page.

ORIGINAL FACE

Tanya Baress

Photograph

The Face of Nature

Contemplate a manifestation of the natural world (a plant, a mountain, clouds, fire, water, etc.). See if you can find your Original Face reflected there. Draw your self-portrait while you gaze at nature.

LOW FOG

Dean Nimmer

Pastel on paper

EXERCISE 33: The Sound (and Look) of Music

This project was originally inspired by the writing and performances of John Cage. His book Notations shows over one hundred musical scores that don’t use traditional musical notation to tell the musicians what notes to play or how they should use their instruments.

Well-known composers, musicians, artists, writers, movie directors and other individuals made these drawings, paintings, flowcharts, maps, scrawls and written directions from diverse backgrounds. The thing I like most about this book (unfortunately out of print) is marveling at these intriguing abstract artworks and, by switching my brain around, thinking about how these “scores” could be played by musicians and what that may have sounded like.

As an opening to some of my lectures on abstract art, I demonstrate how some abstract paintings of mine and others may sound if you were to vocalize the volume of a work’s shapes, lines and textures and intonate the intensities of a color’s hues and values. But frankly, that stand-up bit is the best way I know to interject some humor into a lecture by putting the audience and myself at ease with what I’m saying about abstract art. It must ring the right bell, however, since I got an ovation when I performed that interpretation in front of five hundred Chinese art students at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. Cage would have been proud!

The project I’m proposing here is that you take up the challenge posed by Cage’s invitation to create a visual score that is specifically intended to be played as music. At this stage you don’t necessarily have to have a musician waiting in the wings to perform your composition, because you’re making this piece thinking about it abstractly in the same way you may think about making an abstract composition about a poem, as you did previously.

A variation you could explore is to start by listening to a musical composition that inspires you to create the artwork. As an example, I created Painting Arabesque #1 in response to Debussy’s composition by the same name.

Recommended Materials

your choice of mediums and techniques

PAINTING ARABESQUE #1

Dean Nimmer

Ink and colored pencil on paper

EXERCISE 34: The Visual/Audible Orchestra

This project, an extension of the previous one, involves four or more artists and musicians working together to produce an event that combines an exhibit of the artwork/scores and a concert of those scores performed by the group of musicians. This event can be performed by a group of artists and musicians working toward a gallery event, or can be an innovative project for high school or college art and music classes to add to their curriculum.

The steps in this group project are as follows:

2. The artists and musicians have preliminary meetings to discuss the process of creating visual scores for musicians to interpret and then to determine a plan for adapting their art forms to this goal.
3. There are several follow-up meetings of these groups over a one- to six-month time frame in order to be prepared for their performance and exhibit. At those meetings, artists can show examples of their work to the musicians, and the musicians can explain how their instruments work and demonstrate playing them for the artists.
4. At the time of the scheduled performance the artists stage an exhibition of the visual scores they created and the musicians play these compositions. The recital could feature individual musicians performing their visual scores, and possibly an improvised orchestral concert could complete the event.

Recommended Materials

your choice of mediums and techniques

CAGE NOTATIONS PAGE 117

CAGE NOTATIONS PAGE 98

EXERCISE 35: It’s All in the Translation

Artist and professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Nathalie Miebach has developed a unique approach for creating her sculptures out of raw data extracted from our planet’s climate and environmental conditions. As she explains, “Recently, I have begun translating weather data collected in cities into musical scores, which are then translated into sculptures as well as being a source for collaboration with musicians.

“These pieces are not only devices that map meteorological conditions of a specific time and place, but are also functional musical scores to be played by musicians. While musicians have freedom to interpret, they are asked not to change the essential relationship of the notes to ensure that what is still heard is indeed the meteorological relationship of weather data.” (Nathalie Miebach website: www.nathaliemiebach.com)

Another artist who works from information systems is Ann Tarantino, who comments, “I reference different kinds of systems in my work, from the delicate patterning of nervous tissue revealed through brain cell stains, to the emotional ties revealed through contemporary social networks, to the intricate webs of relationships required to maintain healthy ecosystems.”

The work by both of these artists is not only beautiful and ingenious, it opens up yet another vast territory for abstract art. That territory is information. It can be any kind of information from science, history, animal life, climate change or the daily news that can be transformed into a visual composition: a drawing, painting, sculpture, installation or performance.

The goal of this project is for you to determine a body of information you want to translate into an abstract artwork. Again, this can be an artwork in any medium and you don’t need to model it after any other artist’s work.

Recommended Materials

your choice of mediums and techniques

MUSICAL BUOY SCORE

Nathalie Miebach

Ink on musical score

WARM WINTER

Nathalie Miebach

Reeds, wood and data

DEEP LAYER

Ann Tarantino

Ink and gouache on paper

CHAPTER THREE

Keeping Your Passion Alive — Stop Whining and Create!

There’s this odd notion in our culture and others of having to have an artistic license to do something inventive or imaginative with your art, which represents one of the biggest (and dumbest) obstacles to adventurous creativity I know of. The next time you feel squeamish about trying something new in art, remember that there are no actual obstacles preventing you from fully expressing yourself except for those swimming around in your head.

I teach a class called “Stop Whining and Draw,” and it’s one of the most popular workshops I teach. I think the reason for that popularity is that so many artists know they spend a lot of time thinking and worrying about the same old stuff: What’s a good subject to paint? Will people like this piece? Will this work be any good?

Deliberations of questions like those are classic art-moaning thoughts that take the place of art making, and conceding to our own artistic angst is always a huge waste of time!

The following projects are designed to reinforce the focus on the process of making art and keep you moving ahead while renewing your enthusiasm for nurturing your creativity.

I want to paint the birth of things, to represent the act, the effort of creation. It is more important than the painting. The painting—it is up to the spectator to make it. The artist must work with the thought that the spectator can understand things half said, not completely described. Just because the spectator is slow, the artist does not have to be slow. —Alexander Liberman, The Artist in His Studio

TYPHON

Christopher Willingham

Oil on paper

Materials and Messages — Your Obsession With Art Stuff

The following projects are devoted to using our obsession with certain art techniques and materials as our main inspiration for making abstract art. The choice of an art medium like oil or acrylic paint, watercolors or simple compressed charcoal may be just a matter of convenience that gets the desired effect in our art, but for many of us, certain art materials have the right stuff: the way they feel when we’re working, the way they look in the finished product and even how they smell. This “stuff” heightens our passion for the creative process.

That sensation may be the gussy texture and aroma of pure oil paint, the delicate feel of watercolors or the nuanced character of pastels. Sculptors may gravitate to the excited sparks of molten metals or the deep mud grunge of clay, but the appetite for some particular material, and a way of working that material, can be an indispensable ingredient in our art.

I’ve selected two media, collage and encaustics, that are likely to be the muse that can get an artist hooked on getting her daily fix of “the medium is the message.”

Of course, the art materials and techniques you love to work with can be used for realistic or abstract imagery and everything in between. There’s something magical about a medium that transforms the art-making process into a true passion for the artist.

Given that there are already so many good books on collage and encaustics that go into depth explaining the materials, processes and techniques involved in the creative use of these mediums, I selected a few projects that highlight abstraction as the end result.

EXERCISE 36: Random Collage — Why Not Be Out of Control?

Those of us who are obsessed with the art of collage are, to say the least, a little bit nutty—albeit in a good way. I’ve been a flea market addict since I was a kid, and I’ve always been intrigued by the prospect of finding something there that I didn’t even know I was looking for.

Collage and three-dimensional assemblage works offer an endless variety of possible abstract pictures that use the funky stuff you find on your treasure hunts. Collages are easy to make, inexpensive and, most importantly, offer a thoroughly enjoyable process!

This is not a traditional collage technique but one that adds risk-taking as an active component to the process. This project was inspired by art games made up by Dada/Surrealist groups that sought to take away artistic control of the process so the resulting composition was purely accidental and unpredictable.

Removing your ability to control the outcome of your composition can be unnerving and liberating at the same time. This unorthodox process is similar to exercises like painting blindfolded or doing line contour studies when you’re not looking at your paper. When you can’t see what you’re making, you can’t expect the resulting image to match your expectations, and you always get something surprising.

There are many ways to go about making a random collage, which range from having the result be completely up to chance to having at least one stage of a composition be determined by a roll of the dice. You can use the following list of potential rules as a guide for deciding how much control you want to have in the collage you make.

• Materials you use must be found on the street by chance.
• Materials you use must come from other people’s trash.
• Materials you use must come from a flea market or thrift shop.
• Materials you use must come from rubbings made from random surfaces.
• Materials you use must come from parts of your own work (e.g., scraps you’ve kept in a To Be Continued portfolio).
• Some or all materials must come from trading your scraps with someone else.
• Materials you use must come from random stuff put in a bag by someone else. You have to pick things out without looking inside the bag.

Recommended Materials

dependent upon the rules (see bulleted list)

EXERCISE 37: Glazing With Oils and Encaustics

The encaustic medium, painting with wax, is one of the most addictive substances I know for making art. Artist Lissa Rankin is the author of one of the finest books on working with encaustics that I’ve read because of the number of ways it inspires you to work in the medium. Her book, Encaustic Art: The Complete Guide to Creating Fine Art With Wax, covers all the bases that make you want to get to work with encaustics as soon as possible! (You can see Lissa’s work in chapter four.)

I have enjoyed working with encaustics because of the lush feel they have and the depth and luster of color you can get with the wax-impregnated oil colors. Just the fact that you use built-up glazes of wax and color does not necessarily lead to an abstract outcome. As a matter of fact, realist painters and artists of all persuasions use this technique for any type of subject matter.

Try encaustics because the process facilitates working spontaneously, applying layers as you go to see forms, textures and colors appearing organically without having to think about what the outcome will be.

Another advantage is that you can scrape away previous layers of wax and paint to reveal substrata you want to keep as well as to add selective layers in isolated parts of the painting, which is much harder to do with nonwax media.

The painting of mine shown here is an example of layers of transparent wax in between layers of oil paint built up on a base of 1⁄8” (3mm) steel plate. I use the steel plate because it’s more resilient than combustible grounds and it resists warping in the heating process. Even though it’s cumbersome and heavy, the rock-hard surface of steel also draws me to this combination of mediums.

The layering techniques I used are thoroughly described in Ms. Rankin’s book, starting in chapter four, with variations in subsequent chapters, and I highly recommend looking into encaustic techniques.

Recommended Materials

• encaustic medium
• additional materials of your choice
  STILLNESS

Nicholas Wilton

Mixed media on panel

SPIRAL

Dean Nimmer

Oil and encaustic on steel

IDENTITY CRISIS

Lissa Rankin

Encaustic on panel

Photo by Matt Klein

Serial Art — Working in a Series to Keep Your Train on the Track

One of the best ways I know of to keep yourself focused and on point in art is to become engrossed in creating a series of interrelated works that you carry on for an extended period of time.

Generally speaking, a series is a group of works in any medium with one or more common factors to hold them together—some kind of theme that can be as specific as your own self-portrait or studying one still life from many different angles, to a series that is as broad as impressions of your dreams or exploring one medium or technique through a sequence of different subjects.

I don’t think any one theme is necessarily better than another. The most important factor is how deeply it connects to your artistic needs. One of the best reasons to embark on a series is to get yourself out of a rut.

Working on a series doesn’t necessarily mean making artworks that look alike. To the contrary, works that are part of a series can be vastly different from one another and still make sense together. Starting in 1996, I began a series of one thousand drawings to do in a year as a kind of marathon to push myself to create as many different images in different ways to stimulate my own creativity. This project is an ongoing endeavor and is always there to prod me into new possibilities for making art.

1000 DRAWING SERIES

Dean Nimmer

Mixed media on paper

EXERCISE 38: Themes That Can Spur Your Imagination

Based on the series idea, try making at least twenty sketches from the following list of potential themes, using them or variations as a starting point for an abstract series of your own.

Think creatively about getting out of your own catch-22 malady here, without thinking too much about what something should look like, and just go with the flow. Sketches means any simple and direct way to get to the point.

Once you get the idea of how broad a spectrum there is for beginning a series, you should be able to swim on your own with this project.

• Create twenty landscape sketches from places you’ve lived in the past ten years.
• Use only three colors in twenty abstract compositions.
• Using the clock in your bedroom as the subject, create at least twenty sketches.
• Use only diagonal marks in at least twenty sketches.
• What’s under the earth’s crust in at least twenty sketches.
• Keep improving one drawing, painting, sculpture or photograph in at least twenty successive stages.
• Abstract thermometers in at least twenty sketches.
• The texture of rattlesnake skin in at least twenty sketches.
• Where the Wild Things Are in at least twenty sketches.
• Close your eyes for five minutes and in twenty sketches, draw what you see moving around.
• Put a dot on a piece of paper and make twenty sketches that abstractly explain where the dot is going.
• Yell as loud as you can in your basement! After each yell, wait ten seconds and pause for five seconds, then yell again five times and pause in the same way! Make twenty sketches from that experience.
• Thinking about the life of a scorpion, make twenty sketches of the trails it leaves in the dust in the hot desert sand.
  CONTINUOUS DRAWING SERIES, 144’ (44M) IN LENGTH

Larry Hayden

Sumi ink on paper

CONTINUOUS DRAWING SERIES (DETAIL)

Larry Hayden

Sumi ink on paper

SURREAL VISTA SERIES

Rudy Ternbach

Acrylic over photograph

SELF-PORTRAIT SERIES

Gayle Caruso

Mixed media

Your Artistic License — You Have to Use It or Lose It!

In this section, I hope to push you even further in your thinking out of the proverbial box, and I hope that the projects that follow expand both the process and results in your art.

One of the most important goals I have in writing this book goes beyond that of encouraging you to make abstract art. My hope is to have you see the multitude of ways you can engage and cultivate your own innate creativity as part of your daily bread—your nonreligious spiritual self—to make your life a richer experience overall.

Do this without being deterred by the naysayers who insist that making art, in whatever form, is just a novelty sideshow, a hobby that in the real world won’t earn you a living however much you enjoy it.

And please ignore the snobbery of those art experts and critics who, under false pretenses, claim to have the final word on what real ART is, tossing aside any creative form of making (particularly crafts, the non-art, poor cousin of high creativity) that they perceive to be unworthy of praise or encouragement.

Bowing to any of these cynical attempts to define what art is jeopardizes your potential to fulfill the most important mission for all those who desire to make as a way to substantiate who you are: You are, first, last and foremost, an artist!

And if you still think you need an official permit to practice a more daring art, I hereby ordain and decree such certificate of expressive impunity thereby liberating and absolving your artistic personality from the scourges of innovative constipation.

(See certificate.)

EXERCISE 39: Bad Art Can Be Good!

Of course all of us want to make “good art,” whatever that means to each individual, but it’s exactly that noble, make-nice goal that keeps many artists from exploring new untested territory, and once again, we are protecting our comfort zone against unwanted strangers lurking in the shadows.

This project is a kind of shock therapy for those of you who are set in your ways of working. And if you have your own tenacious innerchild who doesn’t like being out of that safe zone for too long, this project can be the reverse-psychology medicine to get her to snap out of it.

To make this project work, you need to think like a good football coach who has to run through all kinds of what-if scenarios to come up with a game plan that includes what happens if things go wrong.

So here’s what you need to do:

2. First you need to pick out at least three pieces of your own recent artworks that you feel were successful and really look at them to think about why they work for you. Some of those reasons may be that they have a balanced composition, one or all three may have a strong color palette, you like the narrative one or more reflects, they’re the best of a series you’ve been working on, and so on. (You can also do this project by simply starting a new composition with the full intention of making good art. And even if that doesn’t completely meet your criteria for a good artwork, make a second piece that’s the worst possible result for this composition, in effect trying to sabotage the work by using all the bad choices you can think of.)
3. Once you’ve decided what makes these pieces so good, your task is to pick at least one of them that’s the best of the lot and make another composition that is the evil twin, bad-art version of this wonderful artwork. In other words, if it has good colors, mix colors that you hate; if you liked the composition, throw it off balance; or if you thought it had a strong narrative, obscure any evidence of that idea.
   The point of this exercise is to see that some of your attempts to make something good into something bad have the opposite result: The bad piece can be a new good idea! The trick here, however, is that you’ve got to tune out the bad-can-be-good objective and just move ahead without thinking too much about that question while you’re in the process.

I don’t think you can do just one of these good/bad pieces to test the theory here, and I recommend you try this strategy with at least three pairs of compositions.

It’s best to not choose too many different qualities to change in one piece. If you’re making a bad painting or drawing, for example, it may be enough to just change the nice colors to ones you hate to make the point. Photographers may want to subvert the way they process a photograph in the darkroom or on the computer to see what the difference is. And sculptors can create a similar form using materials that they normally would stay clear of. But this is another one of those projects that you can’t know if it has some positive effect on your work unless you try it and see what happens.

When this process works, it reveals that all your efforts to defeat your best artistic instincts—using the worst colors, making awful compositions and having no regard for common sense in art-making—are actually liberating forces that demonstrate new pathways to make art that were not considered before.

I’m purposely not including any examples or material list for this project to avoid a debate about what’s good or bad about choices other artists make. And I fully acknowledge the fact that beauty or good are in the eye of the beholder. So go ahead and make good and bad art as best you can!

Recommended Materials

materials of your choice

EXERCISE 40: Create an Alter Ego to Strengthen Your Art

A friend of mine once said, “Did you ever notice that abstract art isn’t funny?” Thinking about that, there is a form of subtle humor in the abstract works of artists like Paul Klee and Joan Miro, but there aren’t any real knee-slappers out there, whatever that means.

OK, I confess, I have an alter ego named Unique Fredrique and I’m glad I do! My Unique personality comes from my insatiable drive to create without being bound by the conventional norms of what is acceptable picture making for a serious painter. Of course, anytime you start thinking about what your audience might say about your work, you’re already in trouble.

But with an alter ego who doesn’t care about such things as good taste in art or being true to the style of art you’re known for, you can do anything you want and blame it on that shadow figure known only by the name you give him.

The idea that you make up a quirky character who masquerades as your other self is not necessarily for everyone, particularly if this whole notion strikes you as farcical nonsense.

I chose to make up this character because my own sense of humor—something I hold dear to the nature of who I am—is usually restrained from joining the process when I’m making serious abstract art in my studio. And when you restrain something as exuberant as your sense of humor, it can take away some of the joy you feel when making art. So on those occasions when I’ve built up frustration over not letting the child in me participate in the process, Unique Fredrique comes to the rescue and lets me just have fun for a change!

There are no restrictions on what materials you use for your own alter ego, nor are there any step-by-step processes to show you how to go about creating that art.

The examples you see here of Unique’s work are provided to get you thinking about what you might want to do. “Oh, the places you’ll go!” But please don’t feel obligated to make something that looks like one of his art pieces. He has a big enough ego as it is!

So my own Mini Me is not at all interested in good art, aesthetics, art history or any other conventions or proprieties of the art world, including making anything that qualifies as abstract art. As a matter of fact, he is a steadfast nonconformist who paints, draws and sculpts however he wants to by depicting his own ideas that define his twisted personality.

Did I mention that he has no scruples about appropriating unsigned art made by others—particularly art made by overseas art farm factories—that he finds at yard sales, flea markets and thrift shops, adding his own ingenious touches to complete a new work of art never intended by the original maker. (See The Real Cause of Forest Fires.)

The fact is I do enjoy having fun with social satire, comic-book parodies and all that is deemed inappropriate in our conservative culture today, and I don’t think that engaging an alter ego to create art using battleships, tanks and Barbie dolls is a deception about who I am as an artist. Rather, adopting an alter ego personality extends the breadth of who I am as an artist so that I know there are no boundaries to enjoying the process of making art if you just let go!

Recommended Materials

whichever media your alter ego prefers

SELF-PORTRAIT

Unique Fredrique

Of course, most everything I’ve suggested so far in this book can act as a surrogate alter ego simply by trying something new you haven’t practiced before. The goal of this book is to give you options for maneuvering around those particularly pesky mental obstacles that get in your way when you’re trying to make art. Giving yourself permission to be slightly outrageous and unconventional in your art from time to time may be the right chicken soup for your own art-block head cold when you need it.

If you decide to invent a pretend character like this, you might want to decide how public his antics are going to be. It’s perfectly fine to just keep all this to yourself and the privacy of your studio, but I’ve enjoyed putting U.F. on stage acting as the out-of-control other me. Part of the fun for me is sharing this quirky artist persona with friends and those who get what I’m up to. By the way, Unique Fredrique has his own shameless commerce store on the popular website Etsy, if you’d like to see what he’s doing these days.

THE REAL CAUSE OF FOREST FIRES

Unique Fredrique

Oil over appropriated painting

B + BANANA + TEETH

Unique Fredrique

ADVANTAGES OF HAVING AN ARTIST ALTER EGO

2. You can say that the crude aesthetics and bad taste produced by your alter ego are his responsibility—you weren’t even there when it happened.
3. Like the art of a two-year-old, I consider Unique Fredrique’s art to be “priceless.” This affords me the option to give his art away to those who admire these zany creations. You can assign very low prices to work that’s not in line with whatever you might ask for your own art. For example, at a recent yard sale of his work, Unique made a sign that read, “You decide what you want to pay and then take 10% off of that.” Such a deal!
4. Your alter ego is immune to criticism about his work since he doesn’t care about making good art and he has no scruples about offending people.
5. You are free to just have pure, unadulterated fun, making art like a kid with an unbridled imagination that knows no bounds. The only potential downside I see may be that this boisterous, high-spirited character takes over your art-making altogether, but worse things can happen.
   PIPE SMOKING SNOW MEN

Unique Fredrique

Look at the Art of Others to Be Inspired

Practically every artist we know of in history from time immemorial looked to the work of their peers or those who came before them to find inspiration in the work they wanted to emulate. Many artists actually were apprentices to artists they learned from, and others were mentors and teachers to students seeking encouragement. There’s a mutual reward—artists inspiring artists and back again—for mentoring students in their formative years that’s extremely gratifying for all involved.

For me, mentoring students like Angela McGuire, Jason Antaya and James Presnell, all of whom are exceptional artists in their own right, has returned every bit of motivation to make art back to me to renew my passion on my own path as an artist.

I think one of the best things you can do to keep motivated is to form art groups, however small, to look at and talk about each other’s work. Having an outlet to talk about and consider your work and that of others is one of the main initiatives for the alumni of art schools, where it’s common practice to do that on a daily basis. A group I know of meets like a book club, takes up art study books like mine and works on individual exercises they choose with partners or individuals doing the same projects and talking about the results. Needless to say, I’m a big fan of this mutually supportive idea.

And then there’s the now old-fashioned notion of going to see actual art in a museum or local art gallery, which has been sabotaged by our computer- and iPod-driven culture where you can see any art in any part of the world simply by Googling it. And even though I, too, use Google as a quick reference tool, there’s no substitute for looking at the real thing to see what another artist created.

Finally, the purpose of seeing art firsthand in a gallery or in a book or on the Internet should be not only to decide if you like or dislike something, but rather to find an artwork that makes you feel like creating art yourself. This is basic art food even if your inspiration is to copy what you see or make something in response to an artwork you don’t like. If it gets you to make something, it’s all good!

CHAPTER FOUR

Diverse Perspectives on Making Abstract Art

I invited more than fifty artists to participate in this book, and yet it is frustrating because there are so many more artists whose talents I wanted to showcase. This is a testimony to the continuing interest in abstract art today as well as the enthusiasm of the artists who wholeheartedly embrace a wide range of possibilities for making abstract art. I’ve selected a diverse group of artists to showcase examples of their work plus their comments on their approach to abstraction. There are no projects in this chapter, but my hope is that seeing this group of accomplished artists and their artwork will be the best motivation for you to start making your own abstract art.

Abstract art—far from speaking to those things that unite us, to what we all have in common—is generated precisely from giving the greatest vent to those things that make us individually different and separate from each other. And it is by this very process that it re-energizes our shared culture. —Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock

TIMBERLINE

Dean Nimmer

Oil and mixed media on canvas

Eric Aho

The more I attempt to make something real as a painter, the more abstract it becomes. I love this paradox. As each year goes by, I’m increasingly engaged with the way abstraction and depiction or realism—or whatever you want to call it—are actually intimately joined and in constant struggle with each other. It comes down to how the world is perceived. Can I paint a forest without rendering a single tree? Or show the entirety of the forest with just one tree?

I like the idea of negotiating. I feel like I am always negotiating formal considerations and arrangements I can live with. To make these paintings, maybe even to look at them later, requires recapturing or reestablishing a sense of the eye’s innocence. I look for continuity, like-mindedness, a radical idea, a solution to a situation that would never have occurred to me.

I see my paintings as loosely assembled reconstructions of what I’ve seen and felt. I’m looking for the painting that really is a manifestation of the way I see the world when I open my eyes and look out at the hillside or the forest and then close them again to remember and imagine it—between blinks, so to speak. I’m looking for a parallel experience—that kind of truth. I hope these paintings are emblematic expressions of our larger experience in the world.

FIRST APPROACH

Eric Aho

Oil on canvas

Gregory Amenoff

Paintings are all just layers of color on a flat surface no matter the style or imagery. Painting is a fictional endeavor and the job of the painter is to make that fiction compelling—to arrange that colored material in such a manner that it will draw the viewer into a new world with its own terms and conditions. To find forms and confluences of forms that reside between a state of recognition/naming and full abstraction can be exhilarating. The bandwidth in that area is indeed wide and forgiving, but the ultimate test is still the same as it is on the ends of the spectrum we consider here: Does a painting create a compelling fiction that can stand up to the distractions of our time? It’s a hard question to satisfy.

Whatever we can say about abstraction and representation, we must agree on one thing: Painting is essentially magic and magic is, plain and simple, hard to do.

CRUCIBLE

Gregory Amenoff

Rabbit skin glue on panel

Courtesy of the artist and Alexandre Gallery, NYC

Sarah Amos

I think printmaking is in its very nature an abstract concept. You are making an image or mark that is secondary to the final image onto a foreign two-dimensional surface that is, when inked and printed, in reverse. I find a natural kinship in the multiple techniques of lithography, etching and collagraphy for their ability to transform my ideas easily, spontaneously and abstractly. I want the freedom to draw an image relatively quickly and have it presented back to me while igniting the inspiration for the next plates. Printmaking for me is the perfect marriage of a liberating technique and my type of organic/architectural abstraction.

NO. 4 BLACK BIKER

Sarah Amos

Etching and hand drawing

Jason Antaya

Both naturally occurring and synthetic shapes that I encounter on a daily basis inspire my work. (Stains on a sidewalk, spills and patterns of erosion are all examples of inspiration.) For me, creating abstract art employs both observation and intuition, staying mindful of both positive and negative space. It offers me an opportunity to enjoy the process of surrendering control to intuition.

TAKE A LEFT AT THE VOID

Jason Antaya

Acrylic on canvas

Adria Arch

I enjoy playing with and rearranging colors, lines and shapes to create images that I want to look at. I want my work to be surprising, playful and provocative. Several years ago I looked through some of my son’s discarded high school notebooks and found pages of tiny geometrical drawings, and I started incorporating these iconic shapes as compositional elements that direct the viewer deep into the heart of my galaxy-like paintings on paper. Some of my paintings are doors, others windows. They are all portals. I continue to use these symbols because they are a joyous and mysterious language that is somehow both deeply personal and universal.

CONSTELLATION 1

Adria Arch

Acrylic on canvas

Olivia Bernard

My work starts with an exploration of the physical nature of materials. I am drawn to materials that have a fragile quality to them, a sense that they are in a process of either still becoming something or decomposing. I work largely from my unconscious, making connections between the emerging vocabulary and all that is affecting me in a typical day: personal events, relationships, nature, political and media images, even the weather. While my work often alludes to known objects or aspects of our surrounding world or uses familiar shapes, such as cones, ovoids and spirals, I arrive at these shapes by working from the inside out, rather than thinking of them first and then working from that external image. My overarching trajectory, which continues to clarify, has been a movement toward an energetic presence, a transient, ephemeral state. I work between the boundaries of what is hopeful and beautiful, and what is dangerous, grievous or macabre.

OVOID

Olivia Bernard

Plaster and paper bound around cement core

Photo by David Stansbury

Liz Surbeck Biddle

As an artist and human being, I am fascinated with the push and pull of the forces of nature, of life and death, destruction and rebirth. I work very directly and intuitively and respond to both the figure and to natural forms. Our world today is chaotic, and doing sculpture or drawing gives me meaning and focus, it helps connect and place my thoughts. I like to hope that some of my work connotes, on occasion, a sense of playfulness and daring.

CAVE BLUE

Liz Surbeck Biddle

Silkscreen and fabric ink on paper

Ben Boothby

Abstraction is the process by which I take objective truths, like a place, a time of day, a refrigerator, and transform them into subjective nonrepresentational actions. Abstraction is therefore the decoder ring, the looking glass, through which my ideas and emotions and memories get reinterpreted by the viewer.

BURNT TOAST

Ben Boothby

Silkscreen, acrylic and oil on panel

Barbara Leoff Burge

My approach to representational imagery and to so-called abstraction is the same. I regard them both as abstract. My first step is to look at the dimensions of the rectangle. When I make my first foray into this rectangular space, my main concerns are what kind of space surrounds that first move, and do those areas inspire me? My following moves riff off the first ones. I pursue a strong abstract imagery, so that in walking away you can see a distinct afterimage. Though marks and shapes may appear spontaneous, crude and even careless, they are fastidiously deliberate. My motto is “no moderation in art.” It should always be an overstatement, even if it’s an overstatement of an understatement.

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH

Barbara Leoff Burge

Found materials

Natalie Capannelli

I’ve always investigated a relationship to order in my work. I’ve never considered the unpredictable movement of my material as accidental but rather a simple result of the nature of liquids. To me, forcing the inks to exist in tightly designated spaces holds a beauty of something trapped. It taps into the subconscious and denies premeditated image making. Therefore the forms are typically abstract. This type of automatic drawing connects deeply with inner intentions, and it appeals to my sensibilities.

WHALE

Natalie Capannelli

Oil and ink on Yupo paper

Gayle Caruso

Free Fall is the continuation of my process working in a series. Taking an image or concept as an idea and making it as many ways as possible until I cannot make it anymore.

These mixed-media pieces are painted, printed, collaged, drawn and bleached photographs based on a personal experience of free falling and being surrounded by a beautiful magical peaceful light. As of today the Free Fall series has 365 pieces and is still growing.

FREE FALL (SERIES)

Gayle Caruso

Mixed media

Liz Chalfin

These prints are part of a larger series that explores the relationship of science and religion. At this point in our human history, scientific discoveries are outpacing ethics discussions; simultaneously we are also becoming a more religious people, and more fundamentalist religious ideologies are flourishing in the world. I am interested in where these two worlds meet and intersect, especially the point where humanity becomes Creator in the evolution of our universe. These prints speak about Creation as a religious act, a scientific act, a metaphysical act. Where do we, as humans, find ourselves on this spectrum of creation?

The hand gestures that underlie many images come from examples of iconic art and are based on sculpture, painting, embroidery, carvings, etc. from different religious cultures throughout history. Photo etchings and photopolymer intaglio plates from the photographs were further handworked and used in conjunction with printing plates made from scientific photographs of cells, sea sediment, fossils, etc. Other photographic images of spiderwebs, fungus, animals, etc. all add to the cacophony of creation, with each component chosen for its symbolic meaning within the culture of its origin.

HANDS

Liz Chalfin

Etching and mixed media

Peter Dellert

Since I was very young, I have been compelled to find things, collect them and save them. I think I knew then that they had a higher purpose, but it took me until much later in my life to realize I was supposed to make art with them. Certain objects speak to me because of their shape, their patina, the memories or feelings they evoke in me, or simply the idea that “I could make something with that.”

Intimacy has the external shape of a seed or a pod—a form I have revisited many times. And at its core is a circle, an orifice, layers of things giving many messages. I first saw it as some kind of fetish. When I put the nails in the sides it felt ritualistic. But it is also very personal, very sexual, as some might read it. I would be the last to deny this kind of influence. But I would want it to be a fetish that is both erotic and spiritual, sexual and mental.

Like a potter, I am trying to find the center. Putting two halves together to make a whole. But the challenge is to stay centered, to learn to repeat the process, to make do with what is here, what is found. The obvious beauty in the human form and in nature’s forms is all around us. So I try to make art using that as my inspiration and my template.

INTIMACY, 2011

Peter Dellert

Reclaimed cypress, found metal, plastic, patinated brass, nails and gold leaf paint

Hamlett Dobbins

I use painting to focus on an experience and to wrap myself in the moment. With paint I create whatever I can imagine—the powerful impact of something pure and raw, a moment of full-body pleasure. My paintings are based on a specific experience with a particular friend or family member, so each painting tends to have its own set of parameters and challenges. By building the experience I begin to understand what about the moment moved me to paint in the first place.

UNTITLED

Hamlett Dobbins

Oil on canvas

Josh Dorman

I am intrigued by systems I do not understand and by information that is no longer relevant. I combine elements in an intuitive way, seeking relationships of form and color. The process guides me, and I trust the ideas and narratives in my subconscious.

Most of the time, I am able to trust my own hand and rely on my eye. I add and subtract until the work makes sense and offers me a genuine surprise. But as much as I want visual harmony and a narrative for myself, I also want the paintings to be a project and a puzzle for the person looking.

A MIGHTY RAIN

Josh Dorman

Oil on canvas

Taiga Ermansons

I feel most comfortable using minimal means and commonplace methods and materials to evoke art. My drawings with thread on Kleenex tissue may be viewed as contemporary samplers that contain traces of fractured tradition anchored on fragile, disposable ground.

BLUE CROSS

Taiga Ermansons

Embroidery thread and Kleenex tissue

Bruce Fowler

Spheres, circles and disks have influenced my work for as far back as I can remember, because I simply feel comfortable and enjoy working with this element. I think some of that enjoyment comes from when I was a kid and someone told me not to color outside the lines. That being the only rule, it didn’t take me long to discover that I could do anything I wanted inside my chosen boundary, the circle. Soon after that my drawings became abstract, and in a strange way that boundary freed me up to explore the abstract through my work.

UNTITLED

Bruce Fowler

Printing inks on museum board

Sean Greene

My abstraction is a regular practice of opening myself up to impulses that are rooted in my life’s experience. As a painter I handle forms, surfaces and colors that somehow appeal to me. Through this practice, I have learned that color, light and shape have a strong emotional impact for me, and my tendency is to indulge in what feels good and right. My goal is to make work with power and mystery, work that unfolds and gets more interesting as you spend time with it.

#5

Sean Greene

Acrylic on canvas

Timothy Hawkesworth

When I’m there, in the process of painting, it is energy and it is real. While my body is excited, my mind is quieted. Color, mark and the movement of the paint transport me. Images come and go but are only valuable in what they open up inside me, what experience they elicit, what corner of my consciousness they touch. When things go well I get to a place where there is no separation between knowing and doing. It is clear to me that it is the only way for me to make paintings.

In the process of painting, the marks make and unmake images and create movement and change. They mirror the movement and flux of nature. For me, abstraction is not an art movement, a moment in art history or a style of painting. It is a crucial, integral connector to the vitality of painting. What is extraordinary for me is that as I go out past what I know—past where I am controlling what I do—I find coherency and form. Contact with this wordless coherency, the gift of form is a profound homecoming.

WHEN THE HEART OPENS

Timothy Hawkesworth

Oil on canvas

Larry Hayden

My immersion in the process and my wonder at the results led me to the Continuous Drawing series. I was impelled by a path of black ink on white paper, the brushstroke that became the subject of the work, and beguiled by the character of the brush-made lines and their gradual transition from dark to light. The process became the matrix upon which the artwork was built. There was no intent other than to explore the simple repeated line.

UNTITLED

Larry Hayden

Sumi ink on paper

Carolyn Lyons Horan

Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes. —Arshile Gorky

For me, abstraction is the language of an artist as she translates a thought, feeling, experience or even object, and places it externally into the world. There are many levels and degrees of abstraction from subtle to overt. I use it as a tool to help me get at the essence of a truth whether I employ it instinctively or consciously, whether through exaggeration or reduction.

In my series Shape Shifters and Shadow Casters, I am fascinated with the ambiguity of space and perception. While I have drawn inspiration from photos I have taken of cast shadows mostly on flat surfaces, I am intrigued that using the camera aperture and removing the literal context of the image create the illusion of infinite space. Even the shadows themselves are evidence of this diffuse/defined dichotomy. A shadow itself is ephemeral, yet it is cast from something that is tangible and solid. With this in mind, I reinterpret the flat photograph into a depiction of almost infinite space and visual ambiguity. I want to feel the experience of walking through this infinite and ethereal space as I am creating it. I push and pull at the shapes and imagery, removing, reducing, adding and exaggerating.

As a teacher, I encourage my students to experiment with various levels of abstraction, as this will make their art unique to them and genuine, even when interpreting a common experience.

AUTUMN’S BLUSTER

Carolyn Horan

Photo and mixed media

Budge Hyde

My work with abstraction is simply a process of making art that requires an alternate way of thinking and working rather than a more traditional one. I also believe that such works require an observer to feel and see the paintings very differently than what was expected. As an example, I have a strong interest in exploring the theme of moving images, as in film, and transforming them into a series of still image paintings. The title of the series is Cinema Verité, a French term used as a way to create a new environment for film. The use of geometric stripes in my paintings represents a specific spatial construct with boundaries that hold sequential film-like photo/images in a single repetitive continuum. My abstraction is in the skewing, discontinuity, complications and any organizational device that forces me into a new methodology and use of materials that will create a more original work of art than what I first thought possible.

FILM STRIP

Budge Hyde

Mixed media on canvas

Photo by Michael Merritt

Louise Kohrman

My studio practice focuses on drawing and etching. I always start with a blank copper plate or sheet of paper. There is something about the emptiness of the page or plate that appeals to me. It’s usually a calling or need to act out a repetitive drawing or process that leads me to start a work. I no longer work from direct observation, though my older work was based in the patterning I observed in the world around me. This has certainly had an influence, but my current work is more intuitive. Delicacy, intricacy and attention to detail serve as foundations of the work. Through meditative processes, subtle colors and luminous materials, I create images that explore pattern, repetition, multiplicity, subtlety, interconnectedness and the present moment.

FOREVER IN MIND

Louise Kohrman

Hard ground etchings on translucent gampi paper

Vitek Kruta

The idea of these playful abstract compositions came to me from thirty years’ experience painting in various styles and disciplines from fine art, murals and decorative painting, to set design and art restoration. I bring those techniques to bear; my art springs from my insatiable curiosity, passionate admiration for nature and a hunger for knowledge that presents itself in the form of sacred geometry.

I observe and analyze forms and strip them to their basic geometric shapes. I found that from these basics, a new idea would grow to its own independent and original manifestation. This contemplative process helps me understand the dynamics between the form and the idea, the physical and the spiritual, and the simplicity of form within complexities of nature. I consider each painting a personal journey to explore these endless possibilities.

EQUISETUM

Vitek Kruta

Oil on panel

Louise Laplante

My work is informed by my love of old paper. I see these items both as what they were intended to be—items to be read, ads to make one buy something, images of specific people, letters to a friend—but also as abstract elements, bits of pattern, tone, color, line and shape. The motifs I place on that support are added in densely applied chalk and worked to give them a sense of motion. Although I often start with an agenda, I always allow each work to take me on its own path to build its own image. By using dissimilar materials related only through the decisions made in creating each work, I create an image that requires a more holistic style of viewing.

POETRY IN LONGHAND

Louise Laplante

Chalks on collaged vintage paper

Fred Liang

I’ve tried to make connections between Eastern and Western perspectives by interweaving Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature” with Taoist poetry—works that merge one’s intellect and soul through their relationship with forces large and small that govern daily events. Using meditatively ephemeral and delicately elegant cut paper, embodies a reclamation of ancient philosophical, artistic and religious traditions.

MIGRATION SOUND

Fred Liang

Cut paper, wood and paint

Devora Mache

Abstract art gives room to create expression free from given confined ways, in order to create a visual language of joyous colors and shapes. It expresses that which is beyond laws, rules, confinements or dependence. In my series of paintings called Rays I am portraying my experience of one consciousness and our inherent unity with all life forms.

SYMBOL #6

Devora Mache

Acrylic on wood

Nathalie Miebach

You place my work in an art museum, it becomes a sculpture; you place it in a science museum, it becomes a three-dimensional visualization of data; you place it in a music hall, it all of a sudden becomes a musical score. It is the numbers that control the form, not me.

My work focuses on the intersection of art and science and the visual articulation of scientific observations. My woven sculptures interpret scientific data related to astronomy, ecology and meteorology in three-dimensional space. These pieces simultaneously function as works of art, aural embodiments of data (musical compositions) and instruments that illustrate environmental change.

I want to question and expand the boundaries of traditional science data visualization by utilizing artistic processes and everyday materials that provoke a new set of expectations of what visual vocabulary is considered to be in the domain of science and art.

SOLAR BEGINNINGS OF EVERYTHING CHANGES

Nathalie Miebach

Reeds, wood, plastic and data

Barbara Moody

The element of surprise is a driving factor in my abstract work; I’m drawn to inexplicable incidents and events. I like contrasts between density and airiness, between spontaneity and deliberateness, between transparency and opacity, between hints of representation and abstraction, between what just occurred and what will happen next.

New forms emerged in response to this interplay between old and new, deliberate and spontaneous, destruction and creation. Working in this larger scale (7’ × 11’ [2m × 3m]), I was completely immersed in the process, surrounded by shapes and marks. Because the edges were beyond what I could physically reach, I felt like I was inside the drawing while making it. The process felt like cave drawing or like graffiti walls, which are both exciting ideas to me.

CRUNCH

Barbara Moody

Acrylic, charcoal, ink and spray paint on paper

Jennifer Moses

In my abstract work I hope for some kind of association with the real world that strikes a chord of recognition but is hallucinatory rather than naturalistic. I continue to want some kind of narrative at the core. I build swirling hair-like strokes into formations, pathways and architectural spaces that reference an internal world full of oppositions: structured form versus unraveling form, rawness versus refinement, exposure versus secrecy and openings versus blockades.

Straight and curve continue their visual drama, but the current battle is between the definitive end of the picture frame and some force in the painting that resists a frame or endpoint of any kind.

SPIDERMAN’S ELBOW

Jennifer Moses

Oil on wood panel

Chris Nelson

I want to express a certain feeling and emotion by creating an entire environment for the viewer to walk into or observe from afar. I use materials in a direct and simple way, not transforming or altering them greatly from their natural state. I prefer to keep my pieces as broad and nonobjective as possible to allow viewers to bring in their own interpretations drawn from their own experiences. The final results are site-responsive installations addressing the interaction between person and space, on both physical and emotional levels.

REFLECTING BACK

Chris Nelson

Water, light, plastic, wood and metal

Robert Neuman

Robert Neuman’s inspiration drew mainly from his life experiences and travels. He created a striking visual language that transcends language barriers. He explored ideas of the fast-paced culture with broad, gestural brushstrokes and bold colors that reflected the society. Neuman used color as a language, plus strong composition and geometry to challenge the viewer to make sense between positive and negative spaces, chaos versus structure, ultimately, seen through two sides (fragmentations). Neuman elevated his ideas by also incorporating new techniques such as stamping shapes, collage, layering paint and using masking tape to block out shapes. Often, he used everyday household items such as sardine cans, bottle caps and lampshades to create depth and texture within. Neuman’s paintings have a variety of surfaces, which give the pieces a sense of dimension and movement. Throughout his professional career, Robert Neuman challenged the viewer to look deeper into how abstract art can influence the world in which we live. The Pedazos del Mundo series is one of Neuman’s most collected series, most likely because it speaks to and can be related to society, whether looking at it during the 1960s or fifty years later. This series was truly groundbreaking for the abstract artist, incorporating ideas and techniques that can still be found in many of his paintings today.

VOYAGE ROMANESQUE

Robert Neuman

Oil on canvas

Frank Ozereko

My primary activity in making and exhibiting art has been in ceramics, but I have always made drawings and paintings and have a distant history of printmaking. Trace printmaking offers choices in texture, crispness of image and number of layers as well as sophistication and subtlety. I enjoy the control that comes from continued practice, the many happy accidents, but perhaps because I am a very impatient artist, it is the immediacy of the process that is most appealing. I enjoy working in series, making many variations of single ideas and being inspired by every print to make another. I enjoy squeezing many images out of each plate, using ghost images and echoes of leftover ink, even hardened ridges of semidry ink, to make variations of initial images. I continue to work in large format, enjoying the way that the robust surfaces enhance the imagery.

If I had to analyze any attitude about making my work, an honest observation may be that I enjoy exploring more than staying still. I usually do not repeat technical successes but add one more process, change the sequence, discard the guaranteed result in favor of the unexpected. When I look back on my older work, I sometimes am amazed by decisions I made and, even if I am happy with a result, rarely feel the urge to repeat successful formulas.

IMAGINARY VASE 16

Frank Ozereko

Direct print and oil on paper

Francesca Pastine

I abstract Artforum magazines in order to imbue the inanimate with an emotional power. My manipulations map out a tangle of associations, unique contradictions and paradoxes through curious juxtapositions, prompting the viewer to engage in an embodied experience of disembodied information.

ARTFORUM 26

Francesca Pastine

Magazines and metal bar

Joseph Pickman

My commitment to abstraction stems from a fascination with the nonobvious, nonnarrative, nontemporal joys of experiencing the world. I continue to pursue abstraction as a spiritual act, an avenue for clearing and refreshing my mind. My recent paintings emerge from the idea of two or more entities, interlocked, conflicting yet interdependent, problematic yet perfect, confused yet organized, impossibly occupying the same time and space. It is a visual game, delicately balancing resolved and unresolved interactions, a suspended and unresolved moment or thought.

REOCCURRING PAINTING

Joseph Pickman

Acrylic on canvas

David Poppie

My work involves the reclaiming of disposable objects to create two- and three-dimensional works with the general theme being order. Pieces can involve tea bags, matchbook strikes, plastic bottle caps, pencils, plastic cutlery, etc.—items that are generally disregarded and ignored. Ideas are constructed from controlled assignments given to myself, and I create parameters to limit myself to what can be used in each particular series, which pushes me to really concentrate on and rethink the media and how it can best express my ideas. Once these parameters are set up, I do very basic black-and-white sketches as a leaping-off point. From there I intuitively choose colors and materials to flesh out the composition directly on the piece. I have always worked on several projects concurrently because I believe it creates a dialogue between the pieces.

BIG BANG

David Poppie

Colored pencils

Lissa Rankin

My art and my life are all about taking risks—being authentic, making myself vulnerable, pushing myself out of my comfort zone and allowing myself to be imperfect; all while leaving room for mystery, for the imagination, for life force and for possibility.

Encaustic turned out to be the perfect medium for my work and my exploration into the medium turned into a book I wrote, Encaustic Art: The Complete Guide to Creating Fine Art With Wax. As a surgeon, I had to be perfect in the operating room. There was no room for error, no tolerance for mess. But in the art studio, hot wax dripping on my clothes and the floor, unpredictable accidents on the painting surface, etched lines gouged into the smooth surface like a knife on skin, and the freedom to be imperfect and spontaneous were exactly what the doctor ordered. I always said that medicine was my hemorrhage, but art was my transfusion. While it’s possible to paint with encaustic in a methodical, orderly fashion, I prefer to let the molten wax lead me, rather than leading it. Every time you apply heat to the surface, the surface changes. Choosing a medium that encourages such spontaneity, such free-form play and such gleeful mess was precisely what I needed to make art that reflected my inner story, a story of transition, transformation and healing. It’s kind of like life—it’s all more inspired, beautiful and fun if you just surrender to the flow.

BOTH SIDES NOW

Lissa Rankin

Encaustic on panel

Photo by Matt Klein

Madeleine Soloway

My work examines the nature of human connections compared to the ebb and flow of life cycles found in the natural world. I am particularly intrigued with excavating layers of history exposed in a state of decomposition. I create solvent transfer prints from digital images of textures and surfaces produced in natural and human terrains, and construct and tie together the shifting layers of imagery. The images serve as a metaphor for larger conceptual interests emphasizing transition, history, perception and the temporal. I am fascinated with the psychological dissonance found within incongruent and disparate realities, suggesting a fragile world with an ambiguous sense of time and space.

UNTITLED #1

Madeleine Soloway

Monoprint with collage

Patricia Spergel

Painting nonobjectively continues to challenge and excite me. It allows me to draw from my personal experiences while keeping my focus on the formal qualities of paint. Abstract forms hover on the verge of becoming recognizable, tangible objects. There is a sense of anticipation in the works. The buildup of paint on colored grounds creates a sense of colored air vibrating and breathing, inviting you to enter the paintings.

BIRTHDAY

Patricia Spergel

Oil on canvas

Janet Stupak

When I am engaged in art making, I am fully caught up in the medium and tools and mission. I’ve learned not to think about the product that I will end up with because the time spent engaged in the creative activity is what is most important to me. I enjoy the detached feeling I get when working in the abstract—it’s like a dance with my hand and my mind and they take turns leading.

PUZZLE 24

Janet Stupak

Acrylic on paper

Ann Tarantino

I make drawings on paper and on the wall that suggest unknown landscapes, underwater creatures, neural networks, and maps of cities real and invented. Inspired by source material including botanical illustrations, contemporary information visualization strategies, knitting patterns and cracks in the sidewalk, my work suggests infinite replication and growth, exploring what it looks and feels like to be alive.

RED HEAD

Ann Tarantino

Ink and gouache on paper

Kathryn Van Dyke

As an artist I hope to describe things that cannot be articulated any other way.

My intention in painting is to create a space of uncertainty where a question is evoked and the imagination is engaged. I hope to do this by recombining and renewing images and ideas from the world around us. In the end, my desire is to make something that will stir our own particular experience to open up another dimension, sharpen our senses and move us beyond plain sight toward perception and empathy.

CIRCUMSTANCE

Kathryn Van Dyke

Oil and spray paint on canvas

Tyler Vouros

My drawings and paintings use light to describe desiccated organic forms emanating from a rich velvety darkness. They are an exploratory conversation into the imposed reality of the macroscopic world. A significant metamorphosis occurs when becoming encompassed with this work at an immersive scale. The transformation sometimes departing entirely from its original anatomy, tiny realities inspire me to find that which we overlook in order to venture somewhere unrecognizable, yet intriguingly familiar.

The floral forms become brilliantly grotesque when facing their mortality, yet they are forgotten and left to rot. There is beauty in the field of decay; existence continues after demise. A vivid luminosity emerges from the void of the shadows in my images, as one last breath before being returned to the earth. The dried sunflowers pay homage to the natural order of the cyclical, rejuvenating world.

DRIED SUNFLOWER #5

Tyler Vouros

Charcoal and water on paper

Tomas Vu

In my work I explore nature’s capacity for both violence and compassion. A powerful source for my imagery comes from my personal memories of growing up in Vietnam during the war. The visual idiom of the drawings consists of layered open spaces that evoke both topographical landscapes and gravity-less space. This cosmic space is populated with industrial detritus and efficient technologies of war that crawl in and amongst tangles of anthropomorphic and organic forms. The landscapes describe spaces where lines between imagination and memory become obscured.

BLACK ICE II

Tomas Vu

Silkscreen, watercolor and collage

Kanji Wakae

Diversity of style, in other words the wide variety of materials, is one of the most important aspects in my artwork, works with a social and ideological perspective. I try to dive deeply into myself and seek my root, my inner self. I consider relationships between the world and myself through art. My attitude toward my work is consistent, and although resulting forms may appear different, they have a lot in common. The basis of my work is synthesizing and uniting opposing elements, that is, macro versus micro, abstract versus concrete, global versus regional, social versus personal. I handle these different horizons at once and/or equally, and incorporate multidimensional issues into one artwork.

KAMAKURA 2

Kanji Wakae

Wood and plastic neon

Christopher Willingham

On abstraction, my approach to teaching and making art blends the analytical with the intuitive. I strive to cultivate sensitivity to the relationships between given materials, tools and process, and allow compositions to emerge in an exuberant exchange of chance and vernacular. While my personal visual language continues to evolve marks and motifs, I feel the work to be most free and meaningful when it proceeds as an activity without an objective, when I can find a way to lose my way. In “Eye and Mind,” the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty remarked that “It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings.” The artwork for me is an ontological marker of that process of transforming seeing into meaning, and meaning into being. It is the way we make the world.

ARGO

Christopher Willingham

Oil on prepared paper

Nicholas Wilton

Over many years, my paintings have slowly drifted toward abstraction. I became interested in trying to convey the feelings and nuances of nature, and it became important to compose the paintings in a way that allowed them to interpret the work for themselves. It was essential to leave more empty, unresolved areas or rather unrecognizable, abstract areas in my paintings. Abstraction, like poetry, does not dictate a clear narrative but quietly offers a fragment, a piece of a mysteriously familiar narrative. In my paintings there has continued to be a paring down of recognizable natural forms, which now have given way to a personal abstract vocabulary of shapes, colors and forms. The prominent use of abstraction has allowed me to distill and better communicate my emotions and ideas about life, nature and our respective place within it.

CHESTER’S DRAWERS

Nicholas Wilton

Mixed media on panel

Cynthia Winika

Abstraction plays a role in my work as the bones of the intuitive, visual, nonverbal arrangement of elements I choose. I blow up fireworks on the surface of the paper, which leave smoke, burn tracings and deposits of colorful chemistry as the fireworks spin around on the paper. These random marks are a springboard for juxtaposing and arranging my figurative drawings, paintings, transfers and found papers/objects. I adhere with wax medium to fix in place. The paper becomes skin-like and translucent, allowing the imagery to be read from behind and in front. I can also add further layers of imagery or text to make it denser.

HOW TO DRAW

Cynthia Winika

Mixed media on paper

Photo by Maja Kihlstedt

Zack Wirsum

I do not want my paintings to be entirely absorbed at initial read; I want viewers to spend time with them and new areas of interest to be continually found. I want the sections that reference the real world to not be immediately apparent, but to emerge upon study. The abstract aspects of my work derive from observation of my urban surroundings.

Essentially this reflects a version of self-portraiture that speaks not to the literal, but the interior, the imagined, creating vignettes of thought process in paint.

FEATURED IN FLIGHT: THE CARGO CULT CLASSIC – ”KEEP YOUR COMPOSITE OR TWENTIES FROM HEAVEN”

Zack Wirsum

Acrylic and linen on panel

Yuriko Yamaguchi

I am always interested in a discovery process in art making rather than working for something I am familiar with. I also want to express internal feelings and thoughts in my work. Something more elusive, poetical and imaginative in my work is my goal. As a result, my work tends to be abstract rather than representational.

INTERIOR

Yuriko Yamaguchi

Mixed media installation

Yuan Zuo

The composition of traditional Chinese ink painting has not changed much over the last thousand years. The high horizon line, faraway mountain, clouds, pathway, stream in the valley, elegant pine tree and rocks are classic elements of Chinese art. Traditional Chinese painting never aims to create a three-dimensional illusion of space using Western perspective. Rather, the hierarchy of objects in the picture portrays space, and a sense of movement is shown by the size, darkness and speed of the brushstrokes. The artist expresses his response to nature and his inner spirit through these basic principles.

Though my pictures are abstractions that don’t resemble conventional Chinese paintings, I still work from observation and present my own honest feelings or ideas through colors and brushstrokes that have become my own tradition as an artist.

YELLOW MOUNTAIN IV

Yuan Zuo

Oil on canvas

Contributing Artists Online

Eric Aho ericaho.com

Gregory Amenoff gregoryamenoff.com

Sarah Amos sarahamosstudio.com

Jason Antaya facebook.com/JasonAntayaArtwork

Adria Arch adriaarch.com

Olivia Bernard oliviabernard.com

Liz Surbeck Biddle airgallery.org

Ben Boothby benboothby.com

Barbara Leoff Burge wsworkshop.org

Natalie Capannelli natcapart.blogspot.com

Liz Chalfin lizchalfin.com

Peter Dellert dellertfurniture.com/sculpture.html

Hamlett Dobbins hamlettdobbins.com

Josh Dorman joshdorman.net

Taiga Ermansons taigaermansons.com

Bruce Fowler papercitystudios.wordpress.com

Sean Greene seangreene.org

Timothy Hawkesworth timhawkesworth.com

Larry Hayden aucocisco.com

Carolyn Lyons Horan carolynlyonshoran.com

Budge Hyde budgehyde.com

Louise Kohrman louisekohrman.com

Vitek Kruta vitekkruta.com

Louise Laplante louiselaplanteart.com

Fred Liang fredliang.com

Devora Mache devoramache.net

Natalie Miebach nathaliemiebach.com

Barbara Moody barbaramoody.com

Jennifer Moses jennifermosespainting.com

Chris Nelson chrisnelsonartist.com

Robert Neuman robertsneuman.com

Frank Ozereko ozereko.com

Francesca Pastine francesca.pastineart.com

Joseph Pickman josephpickman.com

David Poppie davidpoppie.com

Lissa Rankin lissarankin.com

Madeleine Soloway www.madeleinesoloway.com

Patricia Spergel patriciaspergel.com

Ann Tarantino anntarantino.com

Tyler Vouros tylervouros.com

Tomas Vu tomasvu.com

Kanji Wakae museum-haus-kasuya.com

Nicholas Wilton nicholaswilton.com

Zack Wirsum zackwirsum.com

Yuriko Yamaguchi yurikoyamaguchiart.com

Yuan Zuo yuanzuoart.com

OPIUM DREAMS 2

Tomas Vu

Collage and watercolor

About Dean Nimmer

Dean Nimmer, Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, has exhibited his work in over two hundred solo and group exhibitions across the United States, Europe, China, Japan and Australia. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Smith Art Museum, Harvard University; Museum Haus Katsuya, Japan and in the collection of the New York Public Library.

Dean has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Artists Foundation, Mass Cultural Council, Jasper Whiting Foundation and the Kao Foundation in Washington, DC.

He is the 2010 winner of the Distinguished Teaching of Art Award given by the 16,000-member College Art Association and honored with the 2011 Distinguished Alumnus Award in the fields of Art and Art Education by the University of Wisconsin. He is also listed in the current edition of Who’s Who in American Art. Dean is the author of Art from Intuition, now in it’s fifth printing.

Dean’s goal in teaching, is to inspire artists to find the myriad of accessible possibilities for creating original artworks that are inspired by the powers of imagination and an enthusiasm for the process of making art.

deannimmer.com

artfromintuition.com

creatingabstractart.com

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I wish to praise the substantial help and support of fellow artist and dear friend, Janet Stupak. Indeed, without Janet’s help, this book may not have come to fruition. Beyond contributing outstanding examples of her work to the project, Janet worked tirelessly to help me craft the voice of this book that enthusiastically says, “Everyone’s art matters!”

I want to thank artist and teacher, Christopher Willingham, who contributed several projects to this publication that demonstrate unique inroads to using meditation and Zen philosophy for creating abstract compositions. I’m still pushing for Chris to write a book of his own, focused on the spiritual connections between art making and a higher consciousness.

In addition, I wish to thank Timothy Hawkesworth and Gregory Amenoff, who contributed their insightful perspectives on the history and meaning of abstract art, along with dynamic examples of their own work.

Also high praise for the assistance of my former student, James Presnell, who has developed into an extraordinary artist and valued friend.

Special thanks to Tonia Jenny, for her expertise, patience and support as editor of this publication.

Most important are the over fifty artists whose artworks and statements demonstrate the diversity of opportunities there are for creating abstract art across a wide spectrum of backgrounds and philosophies.

And always, I am grateful for the continuing love and support of my sons, Corey and Christopher, daughter, Lilly and grandchildren, Camden and Kaitlyn Nimmer along with my extended family and networks of friends, students and colleagues.

Finally, I would like to express my highest admiration, love and respect for my longtime friend, fellow artist and teacher, David Prifti, who will be remembered by generations of young artists who carry his inspiration with them.

HURRICANE NOEL

Nathalie Miebach

Wood, plastic and data

Creating Abstract Art. Copyright © 2015 by Dean Nimmer. All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Published by North Light Books, an imprint of F+W Media, Inc., 10151 Carver Road, Suite 200, Blue Ash, OH 45242. (800) 289-0963. First Edition.

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eISBN: 9781440335464

This e-book edition: May 2015 (v.1.0)