ABSTRACT 2 – ORGANICALLY GROWN

I was interested in abstract art for some time, mainly thanks to Margaret, my wife, who introduced me to it (long time ago). But ironically, while I like it very much, I had difficulty to produce myself anything in that direction. Clearly, cut-outs in general lend themselves, probably by their folk-art tradition than anything else, to be more representational than not.

So, I concluded that the best way is just to try. One may be only encouraged by the cut-outs of Matisse, who in his later years has produced a lot of abstract cut-outs with a lot of success. Some of his hallmark works are indeed his abstract cur-outs, as for instance “The Parakeet and the Mermaid”, or his series of “Blue Nude”, both of 1952, which I recently had a chance to see in Tate Modern 2014 “Matisse Cut-outs exhibition”. They are beautiful, and as Matisse promised, simple, but deep-going. He was 81 at the time of their creation.

Henri Matisse, The Parakeet and the Mermaid, 1952

Henri Matisse, Blue Nude Figures, 1952

It has been quite a common entertainment of painters of 20ties century to follow the process of de-realisming of objects or scenes, as seen in the sketch of Picasso of 1950.

When I finished my recent work “Allegory of time”, I was quite enchanted by the infinite possibilities I discovered for modeling of trees for their sort of symbolic and more abstract representation. It is clear that in cut-outs, and especially in my type of cut-outs you can not “paint” trees, as you would in an acrylic or oil. I tried several ways to do in the cut-out that was inspired by a painting of Gabriele Münter and her way of representing trees.

Gabriele Münther, Road to Murnau, …. and in my rendering as in “and how is your mother doing ?”

Another way of representing trees used by Münther is to show them as single huge leaves. That

Gabriele Münther, “Am Ostertag”

Is almost instinctive and has been adopted by several other individuals, like Magritte, who did it in several versions

Rene Magritte, “The search for absolute truth” and “The fire”

The question I was asked, in relation to such approach was: is it really an abstract or rather a symbolistic surrealism? My answer: “ Maah!, who knows”.

Abstract 2 is in my intention an abstract composition derived from my earlier (2019) composition, called “Allegory of time”. Obviously, there are differences, the main being lack of any individual creatures. There are however, tree-leaves and tree-skeins objects arranged as in that “Allegory of time”. The very composition owns to my favorite Australian-aboriginal 2011 piece by Nyarepayi Giles, called Warmurrungu (left, below), reminiscent, but very likely completely independent of Kandinskij’s 1913 Farbstudie Quadrate (below, right).