![]() ![]() A highly sensual, nuanced art, it seems, won’t cause much disturbance in the millennial spillway of theoretically quick reads. The nonplussed reactions to Diamond’s show suggest a cautionary tale about the checkout quotient from works that require more than a first glance in the stressed-out sensorium of the art public. “Nothing much at first,” “not much going on,” went the adumbrations in two local critics’ lead sentences before those writers settled into telling what, after staying with the work for a time, they had seen and appreciated. Taken as exercises in a postreductive, painterly abstract style, Diamond’s blithely charged surfaces seemed too glib, too erratic, diverse, or, worse, hastily slapped down as emotive imagist glyphs, too nonchalant, rarefied, and obscure. Disoriented viewers tended to shrug them off precipitously. It is the last symphony that he composed.THE LARGE OIL PAINTINGS that Martha Diamond showed in New York two seasons ago took some extra scrutinizing before their visibility, and even their sensational impacts, could register. Then suddenly in come the voices and words. It is all abstract until the middle of the last movement…. But …moving on from abstract back to subjective.Ĭue for music. I wonder if anyone experiences their own ‘Road to Damascus’ moment in that room nowadays. The magic solitary specialness is no more. The Rothko’s are now rehoused in the new Tate Modern building in a room with more entrances and visitors. This was before the Tate expanded and opened up Tate Modern. Not suddenly but gradually over several minutes. Actually I didn’t expect anything to happen. I wandered into the Rothko room instead of doing what I was supposed to be doing. The other students were occupied in the busier parts of the gallery. The large, quiet, under-visited room at the back of the Tate Gallery with the Rothko paintings was a very special place. We used to make student party trips up to London to visit exhibitions as part of our studies. Sam Francis, ‘ splodge splodge splodge’, and Franz Kline ‘just black lines’. ![]() Rothko just made big empty blank fuzzy blocks. Pollock was the well known but ridiculed paint dripper. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, Franz Kline, and many others. In the 1960s the big names were American. Who were the artists that made all the difference for me, and how did it happen? Now I use the insights and lessons learned to make pictures that are not just about the subject but are also very much about the abstract qualities of flat art as well. Since then, I explored abstraction for some years and later moved back to subjective painting. And so I had to try to share this road to Damascus moment with my Mum. ![]() And to be fair neither had I when I first went into Art College. Up until that occasion my Mum had had no empathy for abstract art. But instead she thought that I had become deranged and deluded. She had been looking forward to seeing how much I had improved. She had been expecting landscapes, animals, or portraits. She had been surprised and disappointed when I came home from College at the end of term and showed her my latest work. That is how I explained it to my Mum who was the one who queried my art college pictures when she saw them. A painting is either about something that we see or it is all about itself. Abstract art is all about the colours, patterns, textures, shapes, etc in a piece of visual art, without any subject. Think of most classical symphonies for example.Ībstract art is like classical music. Some good bits are just about the sounds.Īnd some music is totally without words. We hear the music and it has either a second layer of word meaning or not. Quite often there are parts of the latest hit record that has words and sections in between that are just gorgeous sounds. Now we all experience musical songs that have words, and other music without words. It seems more focused to liken abstract art to music. Abstract art came along later than Goethe. I don’t know where it came from.Īctually the similar concept of ‘frozen music’ is generally attributed to Goethe who was talking about architecture being like frozen music. The phrase that I had used to fend off my critic was ‘ abstract art is like music without words’. I found myself drawn to the phrase that I had used to explain myself as an abstract painter many years ago. The subject of abstract art and non-subjective art came up again the other day as I was updating some descriptions on my websites. Abstract by Colin Ruffell ABSTRACT ART AND NON-SUBJECTIVE ART ![]()
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