Hi, Ian Roberts and Mastering Composition. So this week we're going to talk about
abstraction and what it is and clarify some ideas on it because it is a big topic
and so I think with some very helpful ideas, concepts around it today, and then next week
we can do, or I'm going to do a demonstration that kind of puts them more into practice. So
this is more theory, next week more practice. So first I want to quote Maurice Denis, he
was a protege of Gaughin, sort of late 1800s. So he said, "Remember that a picture, before
being a battle horse, a female nude or some sort of anecdote is essentially a
flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." So basically he's
saying that all painting is abstract, right? Abstraction means to draw away from and so
we see, we've got three-dimensional world, we've put it on a two-dimensional plane, that's a
drawing away from the world and what's interesting is the word subtract which is sort of central to
simplification, is the same root, and we'll find that actually abstract, simplification,
subtraction are all kind of contained. So let's define terms for a moment because
normally we think of representational art and it goes towards abstract
art but if it's all abstract, that's not a very useful distinction. So let's use representational to non-representational, all
of it being abstract, as sort of a range, right? So this week there's two main ideas that range,
the nature of that range, of representation to non-representation and then a look at four
paintings from the history of art that shows the lens artists were looking at historically that
manufactured the degree of abstraction they had. So let's have a look at a diagram to start.
The whole thing we can see is abstract in a scale of representation to non-representation
so we can see tightly rendered, say realism at this end and completely abstract paintings say
like Jackson Pollock or something here. Of course there's the possibility of going further out even
than that to more abstract like conceptual work but let's keep it within the range of painting
itself. Here we might say that the kind of painting that probably interests most of us I
would imagine would be sort of Serjeant and Zorn to, I don't know, Diebenkorn Figure Studies,
Ocean Park might be down around here let's say. Let's look at some paintings
that illustrate this idea. This is a painting by Charles Bargue
- 1878 French academic painter. Impressionism had already been around for 10
years but you look at this it has an incredible degree of finish, astonishing degree of skill.
This is a British painter Patrick George who just died a few years ago, but again, you can see
here a very painterly way - he's searching out his shapes, sort of fresh as he's kind of figuring out
the shapes as he goes along. Then we have Serjeant where you see the brushwork is an abstraction of
what's actually there. Then a painting by Matisse of 1916, I think and again you can tell what
everything is, it's completely representational, but it's a very different mindset about how
he's going about it. This is Georges Braque you can tell what everything is
it's representational he's just pushed the degree of representation so it's
becoming more and more abstracted. Until we come to Jackson Pollock and we can say
this is completely non-representational, non-objective. The surface of the painting is the
object. This is a little pixelated actually and we have to create whatever meaning out of it. It's
self-generated we have to create it ourselves. So the second main idea is the idea that the
history of art is the history of ideas. The artists see through the lens of ideas and the
word 'idea' comes from a root meaning to see or vision, right? So I'm going to show four slides
that illustrate this idea and what we're seeing is that art has this kind of stylized convention,
it creates this stylized convention that is like a lens or an abstraction that the artist sees the
world through and then there's like this break and it comes back to looking at nature fresh again.
Today there's so many different conventions and lenses that we're looking through, but each one
of us has our own lens or conventions that we're looking at in terms of how we see art. That's not
bad but it sort of helps to try to understand it perhaps through the lens or through the lens we
could say of one of these two ideas I'm talking about today - representation to non-representation
and the kind of stylization we're looking for. This is a painting by Parmigianino
1535 and it's a mannerist painting. Mannerist meaning, well, there's a manner to it.
You'll just look at the way she holds her hand and look at her face. It's not, that face isn't
the least bit realistic. It's beautifully painted but there's a very stylized convention that's
being held to and it had been going on since the Renaissance and continued for quite some time.
So by 1600 Caravaggio comes along and he says "I'm taking those lenses off that lens of mannerism
and I'm going to look at nature directly." It's still a two-dimensional surface, an
abstraction but he has taken the lens off to look directly at nature for the inspiration
- no longer looking through the lens of a style. So here's a landscape, 1840 or so, and it's very
stylized as well. The sense of space, the figures in the landscape, you see how brown all the
grasses and the trees are - it's a very stylized way of looking at a kind of idealized, you know
an idealized sense of what nature is. Then 1869 Monet's like, "I'm taking those glasses off,
I'm looking directly at nature. I'm getting rid of that convention and I'm looking at what
I'm looking at and I'm going to paint that. Then by 1920, his paintings, although still
representational, becoming more and more abstract, almost like color field paintings in the 1960s and
you just sort of have to admire the scale of them. So like I said at the beginning, the idea of
taking on abstraction in a seven minute video, it was a big topic. But next week
I want to do so, a demonstration, that kind of shows some of these ideas in practice
so that kind of brings them home a little bit more and obviously we can just use the the expression
to make more abstract if you've got a tight painting and you want to make it more abstract, I
mean obviously it makes sense. I want to show you some examples next week of both my own work and
some other painters where you just see over the decades it just keeps getting more abstract and
that's something that I'm working with myself. So one other thing is I'm getting a lot of
comments and I love it and i really appreciate when you let me know what you're thinking of the
videos, um, and i'm trying to answer them each week but if you're making comments on some of the
70 odd videos back there, the comments there's, there's too many. I try to read them but
there's just too many to try to comment. But I really do appreciate your, uh, sending them
to me. It really, really means a lot to me. So listen, have a great week. I hope this was
useful. Please do like it if you enjoyed it. Join me next week where I sort of try
to put all the ideas into practice and i will see you next Tuesday. Bye for now.
