Williams - Abstract Painting and Abstraction

Chapter 1

The Studio

Painting is no problem. The problem is what to do when youre not painting.

JACKSON POLLOCK

O ur early purposeful drawings and reflexive marks, arcs or oscillations with a loaded brush, pen or crayon emerge as utterances from the primordial swamps of perception. The first set of visual grunts is often joined by subsequent daubs which build into a chorus of marks each new scribble or scrawl affirms or challenges its predecessor and each mark seems so meaningful and so important. A child gazes, scrutinizes and absorbs their creation, looks puzzled and proud in equal measure. As adults we marvel at these early concrete manifestations of form and their wild energy mystifies or excites, bemuses us even, with their energetic charge. Immediately we are stirred into action and after due praise feel compelled to utter that seemingly most innocent of remarks: What is it? This choice of words, it could be argued, contains a sentiment which will affect or condition our art-making for the rest of our lives. For in this earliest of prompts we are moving art from the visual to the conceptual. We are seeking to exert a control and to qualify the motivation for expression in visual form.

Organizing a photoshoot for my degree show. Seeing a large number of paintings in one place can be very revealing as broader issues emerge.

An abstract artist trudges wearily about these distant child-like landscapes of space-time, searching for that energy, that initial visual charge, to re-ignite it in the present, to see it again in their own work, phoenix-like; to fight back against our earliest loving interrogators and in so doing, let our once-caged animal instincts run free again, no longer shackled by the what is its?; each new gesture becomes our scouting party into future unforeseen worlds. Perhaps if we choose the right colours a land of luminosity awaits alien at the outset, yet as time soothes our tired and raw mechanisms of perception, reveals to us a familiarity. Colour can do this be so alien from the first encounter and yet instil a sense of acknowledgment in us, as if we had recognized something known to us all our lives.

Tumble, 1988: acrylic on canvas, 56 166cm.

Hardline