My Abstract Art

A lot is happening!

I exhibited some of my work November 26 at Craft Kafé’s inaugural Tiny Art Market; and I have two pieces in a show opening December 3 at Five Deuces Galleria.

And, I have completed the first pieces from material photographed during my recent time in Berlin and Frankfurt.

My Abstract Art in a New Exhibition

• What is your passion?
• What is your spark, your light, your joy?
• What makes you glow?

In The Light Within, I used acrylic markers to create patterns of swirling lines on watercolor paper. I photographed the result before tearing the watercolor paper into small fragments, which I arranged in a montage. I photographed the montage, which one sees at the center of the work. I printed the montage again at a larger scale; strips from this print are arranged around the central opening. I printed a final version of the original, untorn drawing on an even larger scale, and that forms the background. After an initial coat of acrylic gel medium, I painted additional lines before sealing the piece with acrylic varnish.

In the finished piece I see a glowing, creative passion churning away, irrepressible.

Before we had language, as newborns or even in the womb, we absorbed our experiences. These covert memories, illusive fragments in our subconscious, shape how we see and interpret the world around us.

Traumatic memories are also fragmented, hidden, locked in our bodies. That fragmentation is how we survived the horror of trauma, but may leave us destabilized and troubled as adults, the source hidden from our conscious mind. And even ordinary memories are unreliable, shifting, subject to changing interpretations.

Out of random experiences we create narrative, a way of making sense of ourselves and our place in the world, but we are filtering those experiences through old cognitive lenses that may be distorted.

Humans see patterns in fragments of experience. But what really happened?

Memory started with a pattern of colored tape laid over watercolor paper. I took pictures of the result. I then created another pattern using markers, over the taped paper. I photographed the result, then removed the tape and photographed again. I printed the photos with pigment-based ink on acid-free paper. I then cut and combined the photos to create the finished piece of fragmented patterns, fragmented memories.

Real Photos, Abstract Art

Those small pieces are purely abstract drawings turned into abstract art collage.

But a lot of my work uses real, representational material— photos of interesting things and places— and creates abstract art from these initially representational images. I’m often looking for an in-between space: something almost recognizable, almost there, but an illusion that cannot be fully seen. And sometimes I want to bring out the most intense and interesting element of a time and place, distorting the images to display that deeper meaning.

You can see this intent in new pieces created from recent Berlin photos.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a giant of 20th Century modernist architecture and design. His iconic Neue Nationalgalerie  in Berlin is all glass and steel, at right angles. As I was walking around the building on a bright sunny afternoon, I was struck by the interplay of interior and exterior images visible through the glass and reflected on the glass, and took as many pictures as I could from different perspectives around the surrounding plaza.

Inside, I photographed Mies’ Barcelona chair and table and pictures of him taken around the time of construction. (The museum opened in 1968, and van der Rohe died in 1969.)

The resulting collage, simply called Mies, combines pieces of these photos as background. I then printed, at larger scale, a photo of the northern glass wall, which shows a reflection of the adjacent St.-Matthäus-Kirche. I sliced the print horizontally, and overlaid the background, so that all images are visible but incomplete.

I was inspired by Van der Rohe’s incorporation of the interior and surrounding space seen through and reflected by his design, which creates a fascinating interplay of modernist and historic architecture.

Reflections is just that: images reflected in glass and water over several bright, clear October days in Berlin. I combined, mirrored and overlaid those images to create something almost completely abstract, but with an underlying sense of structure and depth. The piece has an architectural feel, and on scrutiny you may find and identify parts of buildings reflected off the glass Hauptbahnhof or the Spree, or store windows in Kreuzberg or Schöneberg.

Moritzplatz is abstract art, but more representational and reflective of a single place and moment. It is built of two evening photos taken at a closed, fenced-off entrance to the Moritzplatz U-Bahn station adjacent to my hotel. One was of the surrounding chain-link fence, the other of the still-lit subway sign fronted by rectangular wire fence and dripping with torn fabric. Those images are interwoven, but a full version of the haunting sign is at the core.

I hope everyone has a joyous holiday season. Next month I will have more work from Berlin and Frankfurt, and a new large-scale piece.