• Special message--Even though we won't be doing a workshop in July, we will resume our workshops in August. We're keeping the schedule of holding workshops on the Wednesday FOLLOWING the third Sunday of each month.
I hope you enjoy a refurished rerun from January, 2019. What do these two paintings have in common and in what ways are they different? I am often asked how abstract painting is done. There's no simple answer, but there is this: the only difference between a masterful abstract painting and a masterful realistic one is regarding
imagery. In realistic painting, the imagery plays a major role, but in abstract painting, the subject is not always about imagery, rather about visual expression of something else. Some
abstract painters are exploring rhythm, others might be exploring organization of visual elements, still others might be expressing a concept or an emotion. Let's flip the abstract and take another look. See what I did there? (Forgive me, Qiang Huang). I threw Qiang's painting into my painting app and abstracted out the images then turned it vertically. Because it's a well composed realistic painting, it also holds together beautifully as an abstract.
Every well-composed realistic painting will do that. Now that's something you can have some fun with. Try doing an abstract version of one of your own realistic paintings. It's a good way to test out the strength of their composition. This is also an excellent way to study from master painters--how they composed the space in a painting, and most important, how they use color. It's an ideal way to learn what so many incorrectly call artists' secrets, but that's a subject for another post. Enjoy a well-composed weekend! During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
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