Recently, based on a suggestion made by my art teacher, i tried out a couple of different ways of doing an abstract painting. In the first, i started with an idea from a photo and then moved very far away from the object (s) in the photo. I wanted to experiment with using pretty much only colors that were close together on the color wheel — analogous colors. The colors i chose revolved around blues: purple, blue-green, etc. The more i played with the colors and the more i departed from the original shapes, sure enough: the more abstract the painting became. By the end of the experiment, i threw in a little bird house — the one piece of realism remaining. The process here was fun, but i have no interest in being an abstract purist. I do really like the original photo, though — one from Norma’s Yukon trip — so will probably try to do a more realistic painting of it sometime soon. Meanwhile, the first two photos below refer to this first experiment.
In the second, i tried something called Abstracted Realism — which to me looks like Impressionism. So in this case the idea was to take a realistic reference source and do a painting in which details are blurred and attempts at being too realistic are avoided.
LJ and NJ 