Jul 28th, 2020 • 8 minute read
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The Weekly Curation: Abstract Thoughts
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Many of us have a gut reaction when it comes to abstract art. We remember the first pieces that impacted us, the shapes and colors that linger in our minds. Sometimes we reflect on seemingly messy masses of lines, drips, textures, color fields, explored across the canvas. We reflect on the first abstract piece we felt a connection to –– a towering Pollack or a chic Mondrian –– images that seem to mean nothing and everything all at once.
But we know it’s so much more than that. We’ve been around the proverbial block when it comes to art and we know there’s always a deeper meaning. Abstract pieces can be about internal exploration, a painter or viewer finding themselves in the shapes. It can be about meditation or contemplation or expressing an object beyond its simple objectivity. Through shapes and colors and lines, we can discuss our deeper societal and cultural struggles in a way less didactic or narrative, in moments of pure reflection. Or, sometimes, it can simply be an act of making art itself, for arts sake.
This week artist and curator Mel Reese brings together a collection of Art in Res pieces which explore many of the wonderful ways we as viewers can view, interpret, think about, interact with and appreciate abstract paintings and drawings.
And, as always, summer is the perfect time to hit the refresh button. Let’s refresh each of our own homes with a window into a whole new world.
Scroll through the post to see Mel’s placement of each piece, as well as how the selected works come together in a thoughtful, coalescent collection. Make sure to also catch Mel’s helpful educational tips on curating your own collection!
Now let’s scroll onward –– happy browsing!
Beauty in the Mundane
Abstraction is so often a vessel to consider the new life of objects and places –– of things we often forget or take for granted. This piece instantly evokes the greenest grass we’ve ever seen, fresh cut and glistening in neon green. A simple joy that sparks instant happiness in the viewer. We feel each blade beneath our feet, cooling below the shade of a tree, taking in that fresh cut grass smell. With each bold stroke, we long to be transported to Liz’s world, more vibrant than reality where we know the world is simply delicious.
Liz Rundorff Smith lives and works in Greenville, South Carolina. Her work is compelled by the idea that she can find beauty in mundane spaces that are accidentally visually engaging. She draws inspiration from everyday motifs like street signs, weeds, graffiti, and fences and the spaces that are most familiar to her like her backyard, neighborhood and home. Rundorff’s focus is on bringing a personal and emotional response to the ordinary scenes of daily existence that are often overlooked.
Meditation in Repetition
This piece reminds us of so many things –– classic abstract art, but also doodles and scribbles across lined notebook paper, reminiscent of our old school days. It evokes the feeling of daydreaming instead of taking notes. As we look deeper and consider the piece further, we see a stunning, delicate drawing exploring concepts of contemplation, meditation, and daydream.
The beauty, as in many pieces, is in the imperfection, the moments when we can spot the hand of the artist in the perpetual loop. The circles become looser for a section, then tighten, spiraling over and over again. We catch the artist becoming distracted, less conscious of her looping action, entering a meditative state, only to be brought back to her action in creation.
Lynnette Therese Sauer is a visual artist, arts administrator, and museum educator who lives in Brooklyn, NY and works in her Ridgewood studio, both located on Lenape land. Her paintings and drawings use observation of patterns as a framework for considering spiritual practices of attention, embodiment, and communion.
Organic Forms
The human body is an object of infinite fascination. It’s organic and beautiful, while also lumpy and strange –– an object we all have infinite familiarity with. Can a human figure ever truly appear as abstract to us? As humans we are programmed to see faces in wood shapes, human figures in nature’s creations. Are we always looking for a visual representational clue to guide us back to our own form? In this painting, is that an arm, a leg, maybe a foot and hand, maybe two or three? Elena Chestnykh’s stunning watercolor reminds us to embrace what we can’t clearly see, to live more viscerally in our bodies, ever moving and changing. To appreciate the beauty in the image for its compositional mastery and for its ability to take each of us on a visual ride unique to ourselves.
Elena Chestnykh was born in Novosibirsk, Russia and currently lives and works in New York. Chestnykh is currently developing a curatorial practice to create a community of artists whose work focuses on the bodily experience.
Emotional Portrait
In Gregory Malphurs piece, again, we see a face. Even more than human form, the portrait is a challenge to the viewer, abstract pieces coming together in a recognizable, distorted vision. Each piece of the drawing is masterful and absurd. With each sweeping line and colorful block, we see it rooted in portraiture, though unlike anything we’ve seen before. Is the portrait happy? Excited? Anxious? Nervous? The cacophony of visual information is overwhelming and almost humorous, a window into a person’s state of mind.
Gregory Malphurs lives and works in Long Island City, New York. Haunting and emotional, his work explores our spirituality striving to understand the subconscious. Seeking to expose the inner self by revealing all the things we try to hide away, Malphurs creates inside-out portraiture. Less concerned with depicting physical likeness, his work shines a spotlight on psyche seen through a lens of distortion and fragmentation. His subjects are mirrors in which we see reflected all that is inside us.
Delicious Textures
Big Little is the title of both the painting and the artist’s greater series –– and we see it! The piece is small, only 12”x12”, but seems endlessly expansive, rich, and never ending in its beauty. With its grid-like format, we dive into the juiciness of pure abstraction. We embrace the delicious textures and colors, like rich eggplant and dewy kale, brushwork dripping and oozing across the piece. The bright green punctuates the work with royal purples, both playful and magical in their vibrating visual relationship.
Vincent Pomilio a visual artist/painter who lives and works both in New York City and Hudson, NY. He creates in various types of paint media and has lately developed a technique using pigmented plaster and wax. His abstract compositions have a firm foundation in the ‘natural world’, inviting the viewer to interpret these images for themselves.
Familiar Objects
Each piece within this drawing feels familiar –– lines, shapes, and colors united to resemble objects, almost clear to us, but just out of reach. We can’t quite explain what any of this is, though we feel it in our guts. It has the joy and innocence of freeform drawing, reminding us of our childhoods, feeling out shapes in crayon and scrap paper. In complexity and style, with floating images and text, we are reminded of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s magical work and we love it!
John McLaughlin is a self taught artist living in Canton, Michigan. He works in mixed media drawing/painting and collage on paper and canvas. Abstract thoughts and ideas dominate his art –– following an intuition through scribbles combined with more representational drawing. John says about his work, “I never know what the final picture will be. It's done when I like the way it looks.”
Visual Conversations
Reading about Glenyse and her work in her recent studio visit, we understand Glenyse’s work is far more than stunning color fields and intriguing line-work –– they are conversations. As we swim through the piece, we uncover a relationship between color and line, correlating with specific people and experienced moments of time, held still as if in amber. Glenyse portrays a subject she has in mind, and we are delighted that this piece is a dance with everyone’s hypothetical best friend Bill Murray. Together as viewer and subject, we dance through the piece, floating on lines and clouds of color.
St. Petersburg, Florida based visual artist Glenyse Thompson is best known for her twisting, flowing, textural hand-drawn abstract art made with water-medias on heavy paper or panels, created with colorful backgrounds, others showing extreme starkness by creation on black paper with white or gold ink. Current themes are conversations shown in a visual manner, illustrating we are more similar than not.
Essence of the Familiar
This quiet yet stunning painting brings me joy. Those yummy brushstrokes seemingly haphazard and blurry come together for me to form the essence of what can be understood as a mundane loaf of bread –– the hamburger buns of summer grilling –– and I am immediately taken to a memory. Floating alone in this soft, muted space we find a gentle appreciation for understanding abstracted forms as reflections of our own personalities and memories.
After living in London and Ireland for 20 years Kit Callahan now works in a studio in Long Island City, NY. Since the 1970s she has done paintings based on a rectangular grid. At the same time she has been making small paintings that can stand alone or be assembled to create a large grid.
Bringing it Together
On curating the collection:
Let’s learn how and why I brought these pieces together –– I want to walk you through what I’ve considered. Whether you’re an experienced collector or totally new to the art world, it’s always fun to thoughtfully discuss what makes a great collection.
This week I’ve brought together some of my favorite abstract pieces from the Art in Res collection. As an artist, I am always attracted to the complexity and beauty of abstract. They beg to be discussed and I’m excited to share this with our collectors.
Subject Matter:
As you know, our theme this week is abstraction. And, thus, subject matter is always up for interpretation. Through each of these eight pieces, we see the complexity of what that can mean. Each piece is different, as is all abstract art, and each uses the concept of abstraction in their own way.
Color:
We just love pink. What an overlooked, wonderful color. It’s often shied away from in studio art as it has been societally deemed too “girly “, too “simplistic” –– but there is nothing simple in joy or girlhood or the color pink. This week we explore its beautiful complexities –– and just how serious pink can be.
Materials:
This week I’ve brought together a number of works crafted on paper, a simple medium we are all familiar with. The wonderful thing about paper is that you can frame each piece to fit your own personality and interior design taste. From big gaudy frames to simple wooden pieces, there are so many options to choose from –– matte, no matte, double matte, frame color, and more. It’s overwhelming at first, much like starting a personal collection, but it’s a lot of fun! We know each of our artists is eager to talk about framing techniques and styles for their pieces and we encourage all collectors to reach out.
With these new viewing tools in hand, happy collecting!
Curated by Mel ReeseZhuzh by Emily Berge
Virtual installations courtesy of ArtPlacer