In my previous post I referenced the metaphor of an engine overhaul. With this blog and using the metaphor, I want to take apart pieces of the engine of my understanding of painting, examine them, clean off any gathered gunk or dirt, and put them back together for a stronger foundation of understanding as I work on my painting skills.
An engine is a series of pieces bolted together. In a real automotive engine some pieces are more critical than others. In this post I want to focus on one piece of my painting mental engine that is very critical, and holds together and powers many others. That is this idea of abstraction when it comes to painting.
To start this with a really concrete example to illustrate what I'm talking about, let's take trees. I'm working on outdoor painting. When you paint outside, you end up painting trees. This means you need to know how to paint trees. Trees are a challenge because there are so many different types of trees. They have so many shapes and colors. From a shape and form perspective, even a group of the exact same species of tree will be very different in shape, form, and color. Additionally, they are complex forms. They have leaves and small branches. Any particular tree has hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of leaves. On top of that, often you need to paint lots of trees in one painting, and in one sitting.
No painter can paint every leaf on a tree.
No painter can paint every leaf on a tree. This is the crux of the matter. To paint a tree you have to create the illusion of the presence of a tree. You have to create an abstraction. You have to apprehend the whole of the shape of the tree and allow your mind to lump together all the leaves and branches and structural elements into a much smaller number of simple shapes and forms, that you represent with simple shapes and forms on your canvas. This is the process of creating an abstraction. You apprehend a thing in reality, mentally ignore or drop a very large number of small details (the leaves, minor branches, details of bark and roots) and focus on a vastly smaller set of colors and forms that nevertheless denote, represent, and recreate the actual tree.
This process and this ability that I'm describing is something special. I think it's often overlooked and under appreciated, and something central to the core of the human experience and human mind. It is also fundamental to this thing we call art. In fact, it is the basic process in creating art and, I'll assert, basic to why we care about and value art.
...why we care about and value art.
All art is this abstracting process in some form. No portrait painting captures all the hairs on a subject's head. No still-life painting of fruit captures all the divets in an orange or spots on an apple. What we care about and delight at when we see paintings of trees, beautiful hair, and beautiful fruit, is how the artist said the most with the least. Or rather, how the artist was able to focus on and capture the most essential elements of the observed experience of reality.
Now, we have to for a moment turn our eyes to the 20th century. In that century of World Wars, Cold wars, and wars of ideas among competing continent-wide philosophic orientations about the nature of reality (that still go on today) this basic process in art was not left untouched. In common parlance today, the idea of abstraction, or abstract art, means to most people a form of art that intentionally turns away from reality, or representation, or the process of capturing the artist's observed experience. To most, abstracting means walking away from reality instead of towards it and engaging with it on deeper and deeper levels.
You, dear reader, will need to decide for yourself where you stand on this. For me, what is important is the idea that all art is the process of abstraction. When you are painting outdoors, and painting trees, this is exactly what you are doing. And to do this well and in a compelling manner, one needs to hone the ability to look at a complex scene and complex forms, and distill them down into the essentials.
There is no end to the complexity or depth of the levels of which we can appreciate the world around us. It is the looking for and capturing on canvas those essentials from reality and the observed experience that drive all the fun and satisfaction in painting the world, even if painting a simple tree.
There are no simple trees.
It's a humbling, lifelong, and endless process to try to learn this. It's at the core of what I love about the greatest work by the greatest artists. It's also deeply satisfying when you pull it off and fun to try.