I hear people refer to work as abstract all the time. Sometimes it’s simply a lack of understanding and sometimes it’s a derogatory term suggesting that any work that doesn’t imitate nature in all its detail, is not art. There are two aspects to consider here. The first is what the word abstract actually means and the second concerns the genre of abstract art with a capital A.
When it comes to the use of the term abstract, my question is always ‘are you using the term as a noun or a verb?’
noun
a summary of a text,
something that concentrates in itself the essential qualities
essence.
verb
to make an abstract of – to summarise
to draw from, remove or take away
These give us the clue as to how this works in a painting or in fact, any medium – remove or take away – to leave the essence or essential qualities.
It helps to look at the opposite – the photograph. When you point a camera at a subject, everything is captured that is visible. Whether the subject is flooded in light, lost in darkness, blurred, cut off or turned away from the camera, that is what you get. A better quality lens might give you more detail but unless you try to manage every aspect of the photograph, as in a wedding photo, you are stuck with what you have got – literally everything without discrimination.
Faced by a subject what an artist in any medium does is to abstract. This doesn’t mean that all art ends up as an Abstract work but that the process of deciding what to include and what to put the emphasis on is an essential quality of all art. It becomes easy to see that the dictionary definition actually makes sense.
All artists abstract – they couldn’t do otherwise. They choose what they want to include. When looking at either a landscape or a portrait you should be able to see what the artist has seen, experienced and chosen to accent. If it is the colours of a sunset then that is the choice, the selection. The sunset becomes abstracted because the artist chooses to leave out everything that is not the colour. You like the colours and respond emotionally… ‘those are nice colours and they make me feel calm’. Turn that view into a painting and all that you have are bands of colour on a canvas. The sunset has become abstracted and unless you title it sunset, only the artist knows where it started from. There may well have been trees, stars in the sky, fish in the ocean and the insects in the undergrowth but they are not part of the selection.
A portrait is no different. To capture the character or essence of the sitter means that a selection process is at work.
Having said that though, there are works of art that don’t begin with a recognisable subject as such. Think of a canvas painted blue or a grid pattern or a whole load of splodgy, textured paint. Most people would say straight away ‘oh, that’s abstract art’. But is there really any difference. One statement about all paintings is that they are just arrangements of colours, shapes and textures on a surface. Essentially this is true. An artwork can be about blueness, pattern or texture in its own right but whether that makes it art or even good art is another question entirely.
However, the process remains the same whether you call it abstract art or realist art. The artist is abstracting from a subject whatever he or she is trying to express. From an audience point of view the first thing is to know the language being used and the second to see as an artist sees.