Today’s watercolor experiment:

Until I get more familiar with some of the schools of abstract art (i.e., Abstract Expressionism, Kitchen Sink Art, Organic Abstraction, etc.) I’m going to rely on my own ideas to seed my abstract studies.

Today is the third in a series of abstractions that had its origin as a photograph.

Abstract 072415 – Reference Photo

This was the reference for Abstract 072415, which I posted a few days ago (7.25.15).

Abstract 072415
16″x12″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

Using Abstract 072415 as a reference, I created another abstract study.

Abstract of Abstract 072415 – Today’s Reference 

And today, I used ‘Abstract of Abstract 072415’ as the reference for today’s abstract study.

I used the same basic arrangement of colored blocks, using violet to substitute for the red areas in the reference painting immediately above. I used red to substitute for the green and expanding its area on the upper portion of the picture. The bottom portion of today’s reference study is a brownish orange. I used phthalo blue as its substitute; I echoed the blue shape at the bottom, defined by a thin cadmium orange line and adjacent purple and red blocks with a green shape at the top right of the paper.

Abstract of Abstracted Abstract
16″x12″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

Comment:

If one uses a copy machine to make copies from copies of copies, the image degrades. The first copy is not perfect; the copy of this imperfect copy gathers more imperfections, and so on until the result is just so much noise.  However, when one uses an image as a reference and decides to make an image based on that reference, other rules apply. The artist makes up the rules: substation of colors; alteration of shapes or textures, etc. The end result has equal fidelity of resolution even as it becomes unfaithful to the original reference source.

I am as interested as anyone in seeing what happens with further iterations of this process.