The Process of Abstract Art
|
The process is basically the same as that of traditional art, which also rearranges, distills and intensifies, but is carried further. Indeed, this kind of abstraction sometimes grows spontaneously out of the pressure of emotional necessity on more conventional artists. John Marin was not generally an abstract painter (and disliked the term), but he was led close to abstraction in a few pictures by the very process of purifying elemental forces, such as those of Movement, Sea or Mountain -- As You Will. Georgia O'Keeffe writes, "From experience of one kind or another shapes and colors come to me very clearly. Sometimes I start in very realistic fashion and as I go on from one painting [to] another of the same thing, it becomes simplified till it can be nothing but abstract, but for me it is my reason for painting it, I suppose." In general, artists who have been raised or worked long in the abstract tradition omit such intermediary steps, although they may sketch directly from nature and even use photographs, as William Kienbusch sometimes does, for reference material. Often their search is for the spirit of a specific place and time. "It is the feeling of place that is important to me," Hyde Solomon says. "The nature of an environment becomes subconsciously a part of what I am thinking. And what comes forth, most of the time in abstraction, are aspects of a definite locale." Stuart Davis's Ursine Park, Loren Maclver's evocation of the mysterious mountain landscape at Les Baux and Kienbusch's meticulously labelled Red Vine, Autumn Dogtown are equally specific in their references.
But the essences sought by abstract artists in nature are even more likely to be of a general and universal kind, a synthesis of experience rather than the reflection of an individual experience. "Nature is the continuous source of study for the analytical, for the interpretive painters, but the topography is remote, timeless, nameless. Is this America? Who knows? Is this our planet? No one will tell us," Dorothy Adlow complained in the Christian Science Monitor ( March 2, 1957). Yet this, of course, is precisely what these artists intend. David Smith's Hudson River Landscape is, in his own words "any river." as well as a number of other things. The abstract artist's titles tend, as James Penney remarks, to be Falling Water rather than Niagara, Vast Erosion rather than Grand Canyon, and his own paintings are symbols "of a total experience rather than a momentary one." Even when dealing with a specific place, the abstract artist seldom gives us the kind of split-second awareness of its transitory aspects which impressionism, for instance, provides, but more often the sum of its character as he has come to understand it and feel its significance through his lifetime. "I want to paint nature from the inside, not as a spectator," Gabor Peterdi says and it is true that every serious effort at abstraction involves a deep identification of the artist with his subject. "The best paintings I have ever done," writes John Heliker, "relate to the deepest feelings I have had about a place -- an experience -- I find this hard to define -- but, for instance, I may have walked out to the edge of the sea, as I did last summer in Maine. I may have had a notebook with me and put down a few lines -- or I may not have. I rested on a rock. The sun had made it warm, and I felt Its warmth under me -- and I recall looking out to the coastal hills beyond the bay. It was a lovely indolent hour, but it was more than that -- much more. For it was, to a degree, an awareness of being -- of identification with my surroundings embracing a significant part of my past experience in nature. I went home and started to work with no definite idea in mind, but what resulted related to that afternoon's experience." In a similar vein, Karl Knaths remarks: "A sort of subjective world comes to exist in the mind even when looking at a particular scene. It becomes a concentration of that environment, not necessarily limited to a specific moment of its aspect or history. It partakes of an ideal moment." The words have a familiar ring, recalling the concept of idealism (as opposed to realism) in 19th-century esthetic theory, best expressed by Emerson's statement that the function of the artist is to show us a fairer creation than we know. Change a "fairer" creation to one more charged with meaning and the doctrine would apply equally well to this group of abstract artist.
One of the possibe "meanings" in nature, which abstract art is frequently supposed to irterpret (e.g., Gyorgy Kepes, The New Landscape). is the radically different concept of nature created by modern science -- the world of the atom, of fourdimensional space, of the dissolution of solid matter. In this theory, the artist supplies intuitive equivalents for the unseen forms and forces of ultimate reality and gives not only shape but unity to the bewildering new multiplicity. Philosophically, as the British scientist L. L. White suggests, the artist and the theoretical scientist are closely related in the intuitive sphere by "a latent conviction of unity, which is not in itself in the strict: sense rational or scientific," but the result of an inexplicable "elan" in the human brain that leads it to seek order in experience.
This is the theory. In actual fact, only a very few of our artists, like I. Rice Pereira, have been demonstrably stirred by the revolutionary concepts of science and have consciously interpreted them with intuitive pictorial equivalents. The difficulty is that most of these concepts are mathematical or intellectual or microscopic; they are beyond the reach of our sensory perceptions and our daily experience; even to understand them becomes increasingly hard because of their complexity. So they remain largely outside the artist's normal realm of activity except as they have filtered down into common consciousness. The lalter process may have had a considerable effect on the abstract treatment of form, movement and space. John Ferren believes that the modern artist's "fluid, often multidimensioned, but personalized concept of nature . . . has only one possible historical referent, contemporary science." But the validity and extent of such a relation is hard to gauge because it is largely unconscious. As Ferren adds. "At least I think this statement is potentially true, and whatever 'value' contemporary art may have, it must certainly be in its insight into the actual contemporary world."
It is easier to show that, for the majority of painters and sculptors, the "actual contemporary world" is still what they can see with their own two eyes. One quality which they share to a marked degree is visual excitement, an exceptional sensitivity to nature's colors, forms and shifting patterns of motion. In this they are much like Gulley Jimson in Joyce Cary 's The Horse's Mouth, who is among the few believable artists in fiction precisely because of his constant and pungent awareness of the world around him. "Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried fish shop. All bright below. Low tide, dusty water and a crooked bar of straw, chicken boxes, dirt and oil from mud to mud. Like a viper swimming in skim milk. . . . Thames mud turned into a bank of nine carat gold rough from the fire." An actual artist, Jon Schueler, writes: "One time, on Block Island, I was standing on the edge of a ravine, a deep cut in the cliffs rising above the south shore. It was a gray day, the fog was being blown in from the sea, forming a mottled, moving veil between myself and the opposite side of the ravine. I had just come out of grayness . . . but here, near the sea, the light was stronger, and suddenly the opposite slope of the ravine was green and colorful against the pervading gray of the sky. For a moment its forms and the forms within it were static and welldefined. But then I related myself in different ways to motion. The fog veil was blowing across it, varying in texture and thickness, so that when I became aware of this, the static clarity disappeared, and uneasy movement took its place. Depending on how I looked, the hill moved, or the mist, or myself. Or, if I tried hard, I could make it all stop for a moment, only now the movement was still suggested by the very mottled quality of the uneven veil of fog. There was poetry here; there was visual poetry going far beyond my limited means of telling, and in this poetry were truth and meaning of nature. There were ideas of formation, of emergence, of light, of certainty and uncertainty. The experience will live with me and, one way or another, will appear in my paintings."
|
||
