The continuing interest in abstract art lies in its ability to inspire our curiosity about the reaches of our imagination and the potential for us to create something completely unique in the world.
A major obstacle to making an abstract artwork 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, “Is abstract art really ‘art’ at all?” Possibly you think you have to master realism before you can work abstractly? Or it could be that you worry your friends and family won’t approve?
What Is Abstract Art To You?
In the last chapter of my book, Creating Abstract Art, I ask 50 artists, “What is abstract art to you?” The results show no two answers are the same, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be!
A way of seeing…
“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 [one another]. 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?” —Eric Aho
“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. 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.” —Adria Arch
“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—to find coherency and form. Contact with this wordless coherency, the gift of form is a profound homecoming.” —Timothy Hawkesworth
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