Frankly, I don't really like abstract art. I think it's weird and sometimes unsettling. I'm a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to that sort of thing. I like a bit more explanation than the modern abstract art gives, and I don't like cubism at all - all the purely geometrical art is just too far on the "analytical" side of art for me. That being said, I gained an appreciation for the complexity of some of the abstract paintings, and realized that they aren't just a bunch of random shapes and colors thrown together. Some of the artists who created the works may have had warped minds, but some of them were brilliant.
Here, for example, is some examples of art from Mondrian:
(www.andrewgrahamdixon.com - Mondrian Broadway Boogie Woogie)
(www.andrewgrahamdixon.com - Mondrian Broadway Boogie Woogie)This is the last work he did, and this type of geometrical, color-simplistic art is what he is best known for. However, his art was nothing like this in the beginning. He began with this:
(www.theartofmemory.blogspot.com - geinrust farm in watery landscape, 1905-1906)What lead to this change? How could he go so drastically from the latter to the former? It begins with negative space (or rather negative shapes), verticals, horizontals, and simplicity of color. Mondrian falls into what is called the "analytical" camp of impressionism and then abstraction. This means rather than focusing on the emotional/expressive value of an image, he focused on the geometrical and analytical side. The softness that was in his earlier paintings eventually gave way to harder lines, stronger and stronger horizontals and verticals, black and white with the primary colors only, and an over all minimalist view. Following his tree motif, you see him gradually turn the trees into grids, until there was no tree left in his later works.
Why is this of any importance? Well, first of all, this is a "contemporary issues of design class" (obviously). So it's important to know the influences of contemporary design. Yes, paintings have an impact - a huge one, in fact - on a lot of modern design and even architecture. Take a look at this building, for example, and see if you don't notice the similarity between this and the first Mondrian painting shown:
(www.upload.wikimedia.org - Rietveld Schroederhuis)
(www.flickr.com/photos/homehousedesign and Itarkitekter.dk - Modern Harbor Apartments Design)
There are many other buildings that have been influenced by abstraction and the "minimalist" manifesto, being seen by many as "avant garde" (the "cutting edge") of design.
Now to switch gears and move on to talk about the type of paintings that I prefer over the cubism/abstraction paintings. As part of the art gallery visit, we had to choose our favorite artist from the exhibit and do some further research on that person, preparing to discuss that artist in class the next week. By far my favorite painter in the exhibition we visited the first class day was Claude Monet.
(www.nga.gov.au, 'Port-Goulphar, Belle Île')
Born in 1840, Oscar Claude Monet began his artistic career selling his charcoal charicatures in Le Havre, Normandy (though he was born in Paris, France). As he watched other artists (painters specifically) he noticed that all they seemed to do was copy the masters and imitate them as closely as possible. He preferred to paint what he saw, often using "en plein air" techniques.He painted to capture the "impression" and emotions of the scene, rather than focusing on the realism of the image he desired to create. Often he would start a painting on the scene, and would finish it later - Another aspect of his work that set him apart from many of his contemporaries was the way in which he used colour. First of all, he let the eye do much of the blending, painting short, small, rapid strokes of different colours side by side rather than mixing them on the palette. Second, over the course of his career he narrowed the colours used in his paintings down to nine - mainly blues, yellows, and reds, and eventually eliminating black and earth-tone browns from his painting palette. His painting titled "Impression, soleil levant" was the catalyst for the term "Impressionism" in the art world, and Monet is often labeled as one of the fathers of Impressionism.
(blog.sciencegeekgirl.com - Claude Monet Impression Soleil Levant 1872)
