Now You See It....(Finishing What I Began)

Some posts back, (" Now You see It...")
I mentioned the puzzlement people often expressed about abstract art
and boldly said I'd follow through with some my own thoughts about why I
"Do that".

Well typically I fell into a chronic phase of over-thinking the issue. Got to classifying the schools of painting
I'd need to wade through.
The examples I'd need to show the development of this and that way of exploring
the 2 dimensional world of painting I love.

Instead here are some simple examples from my own work to merely explain why I feel the need to work in an abstract way.
It's just one way; not even the one I always use, but a partial explanation for working in this way.

It is very simple.
Because I love to draw, most days there's something going on in the sketch books or on an old envelope.
If I don't have the materials I draw in my head, to try and fix some nuance of composition or light.
Say it's flowers, it will be something like these pencil/ gel pen drawings or water colour sketches.

Sometimes it's crayon drawing.

Just depends on what's at hand, how much time I've got, what I want to get hold of in the moment.

At the moment these are the sketches I've got photos of,
so that's the sample of what I've termed as,
"Now we see it..."

It's the representation of the "realities" our eyes are seeing.
(I'm steeling myself not to go into a lengthy digression on the philosophical and physical debate on what "seeing" means, and how utterly subjective it is.
You can tell I'm a hopeless case, whose motto really should be "Keep It Simple Stupid")

So there are the flowers we see, which I try and capture in memory and on paper, as much for the joy of expression as anything else.

Then there are these flowers which
"Now you don't" see ,
though there are a few clues more than you may get in other paintings as to what this is all about.This painting is more about the actual joy that the flowers my friend brought me gave, than the flowers themselves.

More often than not when it comes to painting I want to say something I can't find the vocabulary for in straight forward representation of the subject,
but the constant practice of representational work somehow stocks up my inner vision
and provides the substance for the abstraction.

Of course that's not the way everybody works, but usually it is my way.

If then, you are amongst those folk who can't really see the point of abstraction in art,
I wonder can I tempt you to look again?
To perhaps let go of the familiar world of
"Now You see It..."
and venture into exploration of the world of the

"Now You Don't."

God Bless