Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Water Matrix




This is the first abstract painting I have done since I was 12 years old, when I used to do quite a lot of them. There was a moment back then - I remember I was walking to school - when I had a vision of doing a painting of Moses on Mt. Sinai receiving the ten commandments: a painting of someone having an epiphany. I tried hard to carry out my vision but I just couldn't realize it. It became clear to me that the problem was that I didn't have the necessary skills. I began to study life drawing, became hooked on representational painting and never looked back - until now (BTW I never did do that Moses painting).

And now it all seems so different. I just don't see the huge difference between abstraction and realism that I used to - I was very, very dogmatic in my youth - now abstraction and representation just seem like different points on a continuum, or flip sides of the same carpet.

This is an abstraction of the same still life set-up that I used to paint the big still life a few posts back and it feels like a variation on the same theme. When I paint representationaly a large part of my attention is on abstraction anyway; this time I just allowed the abstract elements to float to the top and let the subject matter rinse away. I call it Water Matrix.

No comments: