Don't assume abstract painting is easier than realistic painting.
True, an abstract painter never needs to worry about getting anatomy wrong, or failing to capture the light accurately. Still, abstract painters have worries of their own.
Consider this blast of a painting by Phil Hale.
Hale knew what clouds look like and painted them beautifully. He knew how golden sunlight looks on skin. He understood muscles and tendons, he knew how to pose the human body like the rock of Gibraltar in the center of the painting. Ahhh, but the hair-- that's the one part he had to invent from scratch.
In his preliminary drawings for this very confident painting, there's only one element that Hale changed and changed again: the abstract shape of the hair.
How would Hale know when the hair finally looked "right"?
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| What is the right number of accents grave et aigu that should be spitting from his hair? How long should they be? Should they be straight or curled? soft or jagged? Nature provided no clues, so Hale was all alone on these choices. |
The importance of this black abstract shape is clear from the fact that Hale made very different choices in other paintings and those choices had a significant impact on the tone of the painting, strongly affecting the "realistic" elements which took up 90% of the image.
Sometimes the black abstract shape swallowed up the head altogether...
If you're doing it right, it's not so easy to be untethered from mother nature.
9 comments:
I would say I agree with this sentiment of this post. I wish there more artists straddling the line between realism and abstraction. Or maybe I just need to look harder.
I love Hale's work. He does all those Johnny Badhairs and each one is different. Thanks for this.
All good realistic painting is completely dependent on abstraction. The hair in these pictures is as much designed as abstracted. The flat graphic design quality of the hair gives a nice relief and counterpoint to the naturalism everywhere else.
Most great images have graphic designs of some sort or another within them that set off the naturalism. But around 1900 innovative talents like Brangwyn, Mucha, and Klimt started adding into their otherwise realistic pictures forms that straddled the line between abstraction and graphic design.
R-- We should all look harder, but I think today's illustrators pay less attention to the role of abstract design.
MORAN--I agree.
kev ferrara-- I'm not sure I would say "completely" but I agree that it should be central to "good" realistic painting, and often is not. There are many hyper realistic illustrators who are so busy painting eyelashes and fingernails that they miss the importance of abstraction (Stevan Dohanos, Elaine Duillo and Rowena all leap to mind, but I could list 20 and so could you).
Your point was a major point for the great Robert Fawcett who befriended abstract painters and sculptors, and repeatedly lectured that abstraction was at the heart of realistic painting.
I love that Brangwyn, but I would question your chronology. Long before 1900 Japanese woodblock prints were straddling the line between abstraction and graphic design, and were hugely influential on artists from Lautrec to Beardsley before Brangwyn, Mucha and Klimt came along.
I'm not sure I would say "completely" but I agree that it should be central to "good" realistic painting, and often is not.
If some aspect is "central" to building a house, it would seem inarguable that the house would be dependent on that aspect.
The very foundations of good realistic work are abstracted: Proportion, gesture, expression, tone, value scheme, drawing, pictorial pattern, projective form and space, and so on.
Your point was a major point for the great Robert Fawcett who befriended abstract painters and sculptors, and repeatedly lectured that abstraction was at the heart of realistic painting.
Since many, if not most, so-called 'abstract' painters and sculptors did not abstract at all, but simply designed their forms through visual whim and experimentation, I can't agree that we are making the same point.
I love that Brangwyn, but I would question your chronology. Long before 1900 Japanese woodblock prints were straddling the line between abstraction and graphic design, and were hugely influential on artists from Lautrec to Beardsley before Brangwyn, Mucha and Klimt came along.
Japanese wood block prints are highly stylized already; straddling the line between abstraction and graphic design in toto. The invention shared between Hale and Brangwyn that I was drawing attention to was the placing of such posterized elements into otherwise naturalistic/realistic works.
I think it would be helpful to point out that the term 'an abstraction' means something that has been distilled from something else. Thus what we mean when we refer to 'abstract art' is really a design. There is no such thing as abstract art because all art is, by its very nature, an abstraction.
Diego Rivera said “Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. Every good painter knows this. But a painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without the work suffering impoverishment.”
Indeed Larry, because abstraction in itself is not the point of a work of art, only its language, written as poetry about aspects of the world to implicitly express the author's comprehensions of existence.
Truths only have existence as abstractions; metaphysically portable in essence. "Subjects" are facts; they are realized in existence, and their descriptors express their substance.
Facts justify truths, as actual numbers and results justify equations... One can spout equations all day and assert their abstract truth, but unless one plugs in numbers the grounding of the equations in reality and their utility cannot be demonstrated.
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