MODERN ABSTRACT PAINTINGS

Who has not wondered at Jackson's technique of placing a canvas horizontally instead of on an easel?  We wonder also at his original drip paintings, inspired by Pollock’s western background of observing Navajo sand painters as they meticulously poured by the handful atop their prepared sand backgrounds the five sacred colors:  white, blue, black, yellow and red.  Abstract art such as Pollock’s delineate as learned a process as any traditional artist’s education would show.  Form and color as they exist in nature depart from reality as they reach the abstract artist’s work.  On a sliding scale of abstractness, form and color may seem recognizable in part to the viewer, such as the bright sun on a faraway ocean wave, or the forms and colors may be completely intellectual and portray the artist’s innermost psychic landscape.  For the moment, let us consider the paintings with one foot in the representational art world.

Graffiti is considered vandalism by most authorities and is punished with fines and arrests, yet a graffiti artist has one thing the artist in his studio lacks: an unending canvas.  From industrial tanks to enormous concrete walls of 21^st century superstores, any space big enough and private enough may be decorated with abstract figures and nearly undecipherable names in a calligraphy that is itself a form of art.  Forms and colors in graffiti artwork reach for unusual effects in the viewer unlike any other art form:  graffiti denotes territory by the system of ‘tagging’ buildings and thus marking them as a particular gang’s turf.  To do this, the artwork must be representational enough to speak plainly to rival gang members, yet be abstract enough to bring pride to the graffiti artist.  The type of calligraphy called ‘wildstyle’ incorporates shapes such as arrows and spikes, disguising the actual words so much that only the cognoscenti of the style can decipher the writing.  Add to this mystery a graffiti artist’s use of such canvases as the sides of railway cars, and you have an art form that travels the continent, completely divorced from the studio and gallery experience.  Modern abstract paintings such as these expand the genre and the viewer’s mind to think outside the box.

More to the point are abstract paintings in the way that we most likely think of them, on a traditional piece of canvas stretched over frames.  Yet even this seemingly unchangeable aspect of art shows a modern touch, in that shapes such as round canvases and the polygonal canvases of Richard Tuttle bring to bear our very notions of what constitutes a proper background for art.  Certainly the playful aspect of such different backgrounds for their art shows us how fun the field of abstract painting can be for both artist and collector.

Working our way to the norm of rectangular canvas paintings, modern abstract painters such as Agnes Martin infused her work with spiritual meanings, the subtle colors and gridwork portraying the artist’s view of joy in life, much as her delicate washes of color on fine-grained canvas backgrounds seemed to float off the canvas in happy sublimity.  Such an artist uses abstraction to uplift anyone’s viewing experience.