Finding your way back to Art

Have you been busy with other things? Children, spouse, career, houses, gardens, etc?

Art is so unique, and not easily replaced with anything else. You have that desire to be creative, in any form it takes. It also enables you to escape a little bit, into your mind, your imagination, your loves. I think it’s necessary to put yourself first. There are ideas swimming around in there, if you can just access them. And silence the critics. You can’t be both the critic and the artist. The joy of painting is its own reward. It will take time to find what really engages you, and you will need to try to paint/sculpt/draw frequently. Then you can start to see the path forward. Starting is hard, but not not starting is worse.

3 ways to explore intuitive methods for generating abstract pieces

Let’s say you really want to make better abstract work. When you try to do this, it’s not full of the deeper meanings and suggestive forms we crave. You can use some of the approaches from the Surrealists, which were adopted by many of the Abstract Expressionists. Ok -so here are 3 ways:

1. Physic Automatism: This is where you just begin with shapes and lines; not having anything in mind, just to see what happens. This is much harder than it looks. You are trying to let chance play into it. Try using just line, or just shape, for better results. And do it a lot. Stand up for for better arm movement.

2. Take an object with a detailed surface, like a piece of wood, or pattern on something, and mimic it on your paper. See what else you could do with it. Apply this detail into an abstract composition.

3. Work in collage with torn and/or cut pieces of paper, with no imagery on them, or bits of imagery, as long as it’s haphazard, no pictures of anything, just lines or shapes are OK. Tear up failed pieces and re-use them in an abstract piece, drawing back over the pieces after gluing.