Abstracts are hard! 

One of the things I love about attending classes at Splashout is that we are constantly being challenged to do things outside our comfort zone.  This term we’ve been tackling abstracts in various forms and it has certainly been a challenge!

I’ve heard a lot of people scoff at famous abstracts, suggesting that even a 5 year old could do that.  Well, they’re probably right.  A 5 year old can do it as they have unlimited creativity and no fear.  It’s when you grow up that abstracts become far more problematical.  A real abstract has no source material to work from.  It’s just you and a blank canvas and that is scary!

Fortunately, on this occasion the kind tutors at Splashout provided a number of floral photos to provide a starting point for our work but then asked us to turn it into an abstracted piece.  The b&w photo to the right is what I started out with.  We were further challenged by a limited pallette of just three colours and white.  Yikes!  My idea was to ‘explode’ the floral arrangement and create a sort of deconstructed representation using a pallette knife for maximum randomness.

So I duly created a background that was supposed to be a complex layering of colour but ended up looking like grey sludge.  Start again…

Paint over revolting looking mess with dark colours with just a hint of the under-layer poking out.  Better.

So then it was on the the flowers themselves and that is where my plans really hit the wall.  It was horrible.  The image in my head and the image on the canvas bore absolutely no relation to each other and I was ready to stick the whole thing in the naughty corner (every artist has one) when my friend Michelle casually mixed a couple of my colours together and said “try that”.  Another reason that art classes are such a wonderful thing – when you can’t see the forest for the trees, someone else can point out the bleeding obvious.

So I got to work with the pallette knife on the smaller flowers and actually liked the result.  That just left the big flower in the middle to work on at home.  Fired with enthusiasm I tried to give the ‘feature flower’ a fresh and interesting look and, again, failed completely.  It looked like someone had thrown up on the canvas.

So once again, I painted over the damned thing and stuck to the style and colours I’d liked. 

Et viola!  Abstracted flowers that bear no more than a passing resemblance to the original photo, but that’s the good thing about abstracts – they don’t have to!