Tag Archives: abstraction
Street Shadow
The scene below caught my attention. The shadow told me exactly what street signs were attached to the pole. However, the design cast on the sidewalk is interesting even if we don’t know its origin. The signs are transformed from three dimensions to the same two dimensional space as the arrow spray-painted on the sidewalk. […]
Abstracting from a Photo
I am trying to figure out the art of Richard Diebenkorn. I enjoy looking at his paintings in the books I took out of the library. Many of them consist of geometric patches of paint, some with diagonal lines, others with thin lines reminiscent of roads on a map. My understanding is that Diebenkorn’s major paintings began […]
Abstract Figures
I had no idea that I created figures in today’s experiment. I was just playing with lines and washes. I outlined areas of similar shade with heavy lines. It wasn’t until I turned the composition 180 degrees, did I see the figures.
Dynamic Line Drawing
Yesterday’s edited sequence of photos I took on a walk with Mike captured him in an upset state. I took him on a walk from his group home and I think that he was fearful or anxious at being in unfamiliar territory. Mike is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. I developed a series of drawings and […]
Autism and Cave Paintings
One of the more fascinating bits in Eric Kandel’s* book, The Age of Insight was an alternate appreciation of the people who drew the cave drawings in the Chauvet caves, estimated to be about 30,000 years old. Art historians, including Ernst Gombrich noted that the realistic representation of horses in these caves implied that the humans who […]
Degeneration of the Past
I finished Patient H.M. today. I have always been interested in memory and have read some of what has been written about this famous patient whose profound memory loss (induced almost certainly) by a bilateral resection of his medial temporal lobes. There was much personal and political intrigue and an appalling sense of the lack […]
Is Narration a Component Abstract Painting?
I’ve always thought that to ‘abstract’ something, one condenses it into its essence. Caricaturists do this all the time when they present recognizable portraits of their subjects with prominent features exaggerated. Most artists try to tell the truth as they see it. Visual artists do so by using color and form that represent the essence of scenes or […]
Succulent, the Next Stage
Yesterday I tried out my watercolor pencils by sketching a pot full of succulents on the back porch. The result was nice, although the overall tonal range was rather flat. In today’s rendition, I began with black ink and penned the bottom parts of the leaves. I painted in the pointed tops with red paint, to represent […]
Time Continuum
The watercolor in today’s post is itself part of a continuum. It is based on yesterday’s post of my brother Mike’s changing expressions, which in turn was a compilation of posts from previous days (Dark-Eyed Mike #1, Frame #2, Frame #3). Mike is autistic, low functioning and nonverbal. As such, I have never been able to communicate […]
