I haven’t titled this piece yet. I’m not sure it’s finished. Maybe I'll just leave it untitled. "Untitled #1". There are a lot of things that I like about it. Your eye is immediately drawn to the line. From there it starts to wander around the painting. You start to see all the lines and colors. Your mind begins to create shapes and stories. Your imagination is coerced into interacting with what you are looking at.
I have been researching more women artists but one of my favorites is still Rothko. His work consists of mostly large blocks of color. It amazes me how something so simple can be so interesting. The first thing you ask yourself is, what am I looking at? It’s a block of color, so why is it so intriguing? What am I seeing that makes me want to stare at this?
Sonia Delaunay is one of those female artists I’ve read about. She made art that consisted mostly of lines and colors. She lived in Europe during the time when avant-garde art was taking its foothold. She was part of a movement that is now known as Orphism. It was one of the earliest styles to approach complete abstraction. It merged contemporary theories of philosophy and color to create works that immersed the viewer in rhythmic form and vibrant color. It was that time in history after the camera had been invented and art no longer needed to be used as a means to record historic realism.
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Sonia:
Up to the present, painting has been nothing but photography in color, but the color was always used as a means of describing something. Abstract art is a beginning towards freeing the old pictorial formula. But the real new painting will begin when people understand that color has a life of its own, the infinite combinations of color have a poetry and a language much more expressive than the old methods. It is a mysterious language in tune with the vibrations, the life itself, of color. In this area, there are new and infinite possibilities.
The next time you find yourself staring at an abstract painting thinking, "I don’t get it", remember that there’s nothing to “get”. The artist created it for you to experience. Just be with the painting for as long as you feel it.
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