Well, I have spent the last few days getting my website and social media on to a better footing and I have done no painting as a result. In between times, I have reflected on how people react to my paintings – friends and family. Almost to a fault, they tend to see things in my paintings that remind them of something. The mark or shape that I made may be interpreted by them to look like a horse’s head or a scooter or a building. In fact, it is remarkable how creative their minds have been. I certainly didn’t intend to paint a horse’s head!
Yet there is a remarkable unanimity as to which paintings they like and which ones they don’t. It makes me wonder how the human mind works if, on one hand there is a wide divergence of opinion on what a particular feature reminds them of, yet a lot of agreement when picking out which painting (out of several) that they like. Has the public become more tuned in to abstract painting?
I think yes. Were we always so? I doubt it because abstract art has only been in the public eye for no more than the last 100 years. Although abstract art was around before then, it wasn’t exactly mainstream. Today, abstract art fills the walls of clubs, hotels, corporate offices, galleries and homes. A far greater number of people have been exposed to abstract art than ever before.
But go back to a time when abstract art was not mainstream, say, to the time of Turner. His wonderful paintings of “Rain, Steam and Speed” or “The Snowstorm” are practically abstract in their brushwork and their dramatic sweeps across the canvas, yet he inserted into both paintings just enough detail of a train on a bridge in the one case and a steamboat in the other case to make them recognizable to the viewer. I honestly believe that Turner had evolved into an abstract artist but was fully aware that he was ahead of public opinion and he had to provide them with visual cues on which they could hang their hats. As it was, he was pretty controversial in his day.
When I look at a Turner painting that he painted towards the end of his life, I sort of fall into it. It takes time and I think that Turner made something so abstract that he must have realised that the people who looked at the painting would follow this process and finish the story off. Now that’s what I call engagement with the viewer!
As you can tell, I have a fascination with Turner because he managed to combine history and mythology and things that he’d been doing all his life, whilst representing them in an abstract way. Irrespective of such detail in his paintings that allowed him to give them a title (was it that way round?), we luxuriate in the atmospheric grandeur of his paintings and ignore the impossibility of his skies because we love the colour mix and shapes in his background, the abstract bit.
Which brings me back to how the human mind works. There seems to be a latent understanding of what makes an abstract painting attractive to people even if they are unable to explain why and instead pick out the horse’s head.
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