ABSTRACT ART

I am a contemporary, abstract artist, who also dabbles in modern mixed media assemblage and collage art. I am often asked by those viewing my works 'what inspired you to paint this piece?'. My free flowing abstract paintings come from an internal source as I feel it does with any true abstract artist. The abstract art form is all about the expression of feelings and emotions, conveyed through shape and color.

This page is dedicated to the abstract art form. enJOY!

Michel Leah Keck - a.k.a. The Raw Artist

ABSTRACT ART AS DEFINED BY WIKIPEDIA

The following text in was taken from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

abstract art as defined in wikipedia...

Abstract art is now generally understood to mean art that does not depict objects in the natural world, but instead uses color and form in a non-representational way.^[1] In the very early 20th century, the term was more often used to describe art, such as Cubist and Futurist art, that depicts real forms in a simplified or rather reduced way—keeping only an allusion of the original natural subject. Such paintings were often claimed to capture something of the depicted objects' immutable intrinsic qualities rather than its external appearance. (See abstraction.) The more precise terms, "non-figurative art," "non-objective art," and "non-representational art" avoid any possible ambiguity.

Non-objective art is not an invention of the 20th century - humans have made non-objective art since they first drew pictures in the dirt. In the Islamic religion the depiction of humans is not allowed, and consequently the Islamic culture developed a high standard of decorative arts. Calligraphy is also a form of non-figurative art. Abstract designs have also existed in Western culture in many contexts. However, Abstract art is distinct from pattern-making in design, since it draws on the distinction between decorative art and fine art, in which a painting is an object of thoughtful contemplation in its own right.

Constructivism (1915) and De Stijl (1917) were parallel movements which took abstraction into the three dimensions of sculpture and architecture. The Constructivists believed that the artist's work was a revolutionary activity, to express the aspirations of the people, using machine production and graphic and photographic means of communication. Some of the American Abstract expressionists are purely abstract and include: Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Hans Hofmann although they were at times inspired by myth, figuration, architecture, and nature. Op Art (1962) and Minimalism (1965)^{[citation needed]} were two recent idioms. It is, at present possible that an artist's work is seen as an individual entity rather than part of a movement. The late Yves Klein and the late John McLaughlin, and the more current Callum Innes, Sean Scully, and Yuko Shiraishi are but a few of the many abstract painters whose works can be seen today.

untitled - (views of the city series) - 60" x 20" x 1.5" mixed media on canvas - artist: Michel Leah Keck aka The Raw Artist

Who Started The Abstract Art Movement?

Cubism and Surrealism Art were both art forms that promoted abstracted form rather than representational form. Abstract art is rooted in and grew out of these two earlier 20th century art movements.    

There is much debate on which artist should be attributed to the start of the abstract art movement. Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian born painter, is oftened credited as being the 'father of abstract art'. There are of course many other important figures at the very start of the abstract art movements, including but not limited to, Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, and Max Ernst to name a few. It was the migration to the United States during World War II by many of these leading abstract artists that brought the abstract art form to New York.

Abstract Art Painting Styles

Geometric Abstract Art

While geometric art is often attributed to an invention of artists in the 20th century, it is true that art geometric art has been alive for centuries through art works and design motifs of many cultures throughout history. Throughout history there have been many artists working in many artistic styles that have been influenced by geometric patterns and their portrayal of them in their art work.

The information reprinted directly below is amazing in-depth article on geometric abstract art that was written by Magdalena Dabrowski who works for the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and reprinted from their reprint of the article (shown here).

  "The pictorial language of geometric abstraction, based on the use of simple geometric forms placed in nonillusionistic space and combined into nonobjective compositions, evolved as the logical conclusion of the Cubist destruction and reformulation of the established conventions of form and space. Initiated by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in 1908-9, Cubism subverted the traditional depiction relying upon the imitation of forms of the surrounding visual world in the illusionistic--post-Renaissance-perspectival space. The High Analytic Cubist phase, which reached its peak in mid-1910, made available to artists the planarity of overlapping frontal surfaces held together by a linear grid. The next phase-Synthetic Cubism, 1912-14 - introduced the flatly painted synthesized shapes, abstract space, and "constructional" elements of the composition. These three aspects became the fundamental characteristics of abstract geometric art. The freedom of experimentation with different materials and spatial relationships between various compositional parts, which evolved from the Cubist practice of collage and papiers colles (1912), also emphasized the flatness of the picture surface-as the carrier of applied elements-as well as the physical "reality" of the explored forms and materials. Geometric abstraction, through the Cubist process of purifying art of the vestiges of visual reality, focused on the inherent two-dimensional features of painting.

This process of evolving a purely pictorial reality built of elemental geometric forms assumed different stylistic expressions in various European countries and in Russia. In Holland, the main creator and the most important proponent of geometric abstract language was Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). Along with other members of the De Stijl group - Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leck, and Vilmos Huszar-Mondrian's work was intended to convey "absolute reality," construed as the world of pure geometric forms underlying all existence and related according to the vertical-horizontal principle of straight lines and pure spectral colors. Mondrian's geometric style, which he termed "Neoplasticism," developed between 1915 and 1920. In that year, he published his manifesto "Le Neoplasticisme" and for the next two-and-a-half decades continued to work in his characteristic geometric style, expunged of all references to the real world, and posited on the geometric division of the canvas through black vertical and horizontal lines of varied thickness, complemented by blocks of primary colors, particularly blue, red, and yellow. Similar compositional principles underlie the work of the De Stijl artists, who applied them with slight formal modifications to achieve their independent, personal expression.

In Russia, the language of geometric abstraction first appeared in 1915 in the work of the avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), in the style he termed Suprematism. Creating nonobjective compositions of elemental forms floating in white unstructured space, Malevich strove to achieve "the absolute," the higher spiritual reality that he called the "fourth dimension." Simultaneously, his compatriot Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) originated a new geometric abstract idiom in an innovative three-dimensional form, which he first dubbed "painterly reliefs" and subsequently "counter-reliefs" (1915-17). These were assemblages of randomly found industrial materials whose geometric form was dictated by their inherent properties, such as wood, metal, or glass. That principle, which Tatlin called "the culture of materials," spurred the rise of the Russian avant-garde movement Constructivism (1918-21), which explored geometric form in two and three dimensions. The main practitioners of Constructivism included Liubov Popova (1889-1924), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956), Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958), and El Lissitzky (1890-1941). It was Lissitzky who became the transmitter of Constructivism to Germany, where its principles were later embodied in the teachings of the Bauhaus. Founded by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, it became during the 1920s (and until its dismantling by the Nazis in 1933) the vital proponent of geometric abstraction and experimental modern architecture. As a teaching institution, the Bauhaus encompassed different disciplines: painting, graphic arts, stage design, theater, and architecture. The art faculty was recruited from among the most distinguished painters of the time: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Oskar Schlemmer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, all of whom were devoted to the ideal of the purity of geometric form as the most appropriate expression of the modernist canon.

In France, during the 1920s, geometric abstraction manifested itself as the underlying principle of the Art Deco style, which propagated broad use of geometric form for ornamental purposes in the decorative and applied arts as well as in architecture. In the 1930s, Paris became the center of a geometric abstraction that arose out of its Synthetic Cubist sources and focused around the group Cercle et Carre (1930), and later Abstraction-Creation (1932). With the outbreak of World War II, the focus of geometric abstraction shifted to New York, where the tradition was continued by the American Abstract Artists group (formed in 1937), including Burgoyne Diller and Ilya Bolotowsky. With the arrival of the Europeans Josef Albers (1933) and Piet Mondrian (1940), and such major events as the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), organized by the Museum of Modern Art, and the creation of the Museum of Non-Objective Art (1939, now the Guggenheim), the geometric tradition acquired a new resonance but it was essentially past its creative phase. Its influences, however, reached younger generations of artists, most directly affecting the Minimalist art of the 1960s, which used pure geometric form, stripped to its austere essentials, as the primary language of expression. Artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Dorothea Rockburne studied the geometric tradition and transformed it into their own artistic vocabulary."          

Abstract Art Style: Action Painting

It was an American art critic, Harold Rosenberg, who coined the term 'action painting' in 1952. Action painting, or gestural abstraction, is one of the key styles of abstract expressionism.

Action painting as described on wikipedia as...

Action painting, sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied. The resulting work often emphasizes the physical act of painting itself as an essential aspect of the finished work or concern of its artist.

Some of the more notable action painters were Jackson Pollock, Norman Bluhm, Sam Francis, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Albert Kotin, Lee Krasner, Alfred Leslie, Joan Mitchell and Jack Tworkov.

Abstract Art Style: Color Field Painting

Color Field painting was initally considered a style of painting within the abstract expressionism art movement, but as it progressed into the early to mid 1960's it started to move in a new direction.

Some of the more notable color field painters include; Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman. A second generation of Color Field painters emerged and 'color field' painting was the term also being used to describe artists like Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler, and Frank Stella. Color Field painting soon was being categorized into other forms of abstract painting such as post-painterly abstraction, lyrical abstraction, suprematism, hard-edge painting.  

Abstract Art Style: Hard Edge Painting

Hard-edge painting as described by wikipedia as ...

Hard-edge painting consists of rough, straight edges that are geometrically consistent. It encompasses rich solid colors, neatness of surface, and arranged forms all over the canvas. The Hard-edge painting style is a subdivision of Post-painterly Abstraction, which in turn emerged from Color field.

Art historian, writer and critic, Jules Langsner, was the first to coin the term hard edge painting in 1959. He used the term hard-edge painting to describe the abstract art works of four west coast artists from California about an exhibition of their works called 'The Four Abstract Classicists'. These artists were Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley and John McLaughlin.

Credit is often given to the coining of the term 'hard edge painting' by a British art critic Lawrence Alloway who later used those words (hard edged) in his description of contemporary American geometric abstract paintings. This style of geometric abstraction refers back to the work of Josef Albers and Piet Mondrian. Artists associated with Hard-edge painting include Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Alexander Liberman, Brice Marden, Kenneth Noland, Ad Reinhardt, and Jack Youngerman.

untitled - 48" x 24" x 1.5" acrylic & graphite on canvas - artist: Michel Leah Keck aka The Raw Artist

Abstract Expressionists - The New York School

Robert Coates was the first person to use the term "Abstract Expressionism" and he did so in March issue of the New Yorker in 1936. Some of the artists associated with abstract expressionism include but are not limited to the following; Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), Franz Kline (1910-1962), Lee Krasner (1908-1984), Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), William Baziotes (1912-1963), Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Barnett Newman (1905-1970), Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), and Clyfford Still (1904-1980).

I am a contemporary abstract mixed media artist residing in Northwest Indiana. Since 2003 I have been working as a full-time, professional artist. I am a self-taught, and self-representing artist. My contemporary style of abstract art painting (see some examples below) has received rave reviews from discerning art collectors and art gallery owners around the world. My contemporary abstract art paintings hang in both private and corporate abstract art collections in over 15 countries world-wide. I turned to the internet in 2003 as a self-representing artist to promote my abstract & mixed media art paintings. Since that time I've sold over 1,500 original abstract art paintings, and over 2,000 of my contemporary abstract art giclee prints.

My contemporary, organic style of abstract painting has also sparked great interest from abstract artists not only in the United States but contemporary abstract artists all over the world. I'm often asked to share my 'secrets' and painting techniques with emerging abstract artists who wish to paint in my style. I've spent much of my free time mentoring abstract artists around the world on how to not only use the techniques I use to create my abstract paintings, but how to successfully market their abstract art work as well. I've given art classes on teaching the different abstract art painting techniques I use to create my powerful abstract paintings both in studio and through videos online.

Citation for this page.

Wikipedia.org
Dabrowski, Magdalena. "Geometric Abstraction". In Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000 -. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/geab/hd_geab.htm (October 2004)

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