Today's Online Abstract Art Gallery #49

" THREE EMERGING"" - MODERN ABSTRACT PAINTING/COLLAGE ON PAPER by Errol Moo Young

The 49th in a series featuring and showcasing some of my Contemporary Abstract Art Paintings, Drawings, Collage and digital experimentations and explorations.

Today's title is "Three Emerging". The abstract artwork fuses collage elements of drawing, collage elements and painting.
It's a flurry of activity, almost confusing as three figures emerge from an incarceration of expressionist paint.

Using the gallery approach demonstrates how abstract artworks can be displayed on walls in a variety of colors.

The frame and mat around the photo are used for design purposes to enhance the paintings, the frame is not for sale.

For more information about purchases and a more comprehensive view of my contemporary abstract art drawings, paintings, collages and digital fusions, visit -

http://www.yessy.com/emooyoung

more artworks on video can be seen at- http://youtube.com/Emooyoung
or for more information write me at
emooyoung@gmail.com

More notes on modern art

More notes on Modern Art over the years

Looking back on some old notebooks, these quotes have remained in my thoughts about modern art and especially abstract art and its history. The turning point in the thinking of artists like Cezanne, Picasso and the father of abstract art-Kandinsky. The sequence that led to the rejection of the art that preceded it.
They coincided with my own thoughts but better articulated by various writers.

“The Art of Australia” by Robert Hughes.
“ Good taste” feeds on the past... Being nostalgic it is a useless instrument for measuring the worth of the new.
If an artist depends on it...his ability to expand his consciousness will gradually atrophy, his style will close in on him like Poe’s shrinking room, and in the end he will be left with nothing but copied variations on a prototype he barely understands.
“Times of luxury art recur. Their feature is that art loses its ritual and dynamic character. It becomes decorative. Pictures are passive; no longer outlets through which emotion and ideas are directed on experience with intense force, they exist on plesantly equal terms with the bureau above which they hang. Both are simple objects, Art abdicates its true role, which is to intensify experience; instead, it makes life more ingratiating by giving it a little twist here and a tweak there, drawing what sustenance it has from simple materal value. The spiritual life of its society is not strong enough to insist on some kind of expression through symbols.

Painting in the 20th Century by Werner Haftmann-
Ideas underlying modern art
“ Modern Art differs radically from art of the past because of a profound change in the thinking of artist concerned. They arose to a lesser extent from the thinking of Hegel, Fieller, Croce and Bergson, but a larger extent from diliberations which could not be disregarded, as they arose in actual artistic practice, in the dialogue of the painter with visible nature and the search for the elements which could make the painting a self existent organism and for the expressional power of purely pictorial means.
... the interactivity of intuition and intellect in which spontaneous vision is intellectually scrutinized is highly characteristic of modern painting.
...to be appreciated (a modern painting) one has to look with discerning scrutinity, and with an understanding of the true nature: the products of observation, the visual experiences of reality, of creation, and with the confrontation with the colours and forms evoked by these experiences.
... it arose (the new relationship) in the revolutionary discovery that visible reality is only one manifestation of the real, that the inner world posseses just as concrete a reality, as much truth and reality as the images.

Much more notes are hidden in other notebooks, to be continued in the future.

Art and Nature by Picasso

Picasso's views on Nature and Art

Picasso in "Picasso on Art, A Selection of Views" by Dore Ashton, stated "They speak of naturalism in opposition to modern art. I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art. Nature and art being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not." ( De Zayas, 1923)

In another opinion on nature Picasso compares art and nature in previous eras.

" Nature is one thing and painting is quite another. Painting is the equivalent of nature. We must thank the painters for the image we have of nature. We perceive it through their eyes. Generally speaking, we stick to to the reproduction which the classical painters gave us, like the painters of the seventeenth century, Poussin. The image they gave is accepted as the true nature, because their syntax is well established. But we have no assurance that this image is truer than other images created in other epochs. Actually it isn't anything more than a question of signs. It has been agreed upon that a specific sign represents a tree, another a house, a man, a woman; exactly as in a language the word 'man' evokes the image of a man, the word 'house' a house and this in all languages although in every language the word varies. It's an established convention by the use of these signs" (Warnod 1945)

What are your views on nature and modern art?

Abstract Painting influenced by Science?

I just read an interesting theory about the radical shift in thinking and the conception of reality that took place at the turn of the 20th century in Modern Art.

To quote from 'Painting in the Twentieth Century' by Werner Haftmann, - " Dates seem to suggest that some kind of connection exists between science and painting. The radical changes in painting took place between 1900 and 1910. Significant dates are: 1905 Fauvism; 1907 Cubism; 1910 the first abstract painting. A concordance of of dates important in the history of science runs thus: 1900 Planck's quantum theory; and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams; 1905 Einstein's special theory of relativity; 1908 Minkowski's mathematical formulation of the dimensions of space-time."

Many artists such as Klee, Kandinsky, Delaunay and others have stated that their encounters with the discoveries of natural science often threw light upon their own intuitive and artistic activity.

What do you think? That there was a close connection between the new discoveries in science and the radical shifts in the way art was viewed by the prominent and well read artists of these early periods of the 20th century? I think so.

" Abstract art is the product of a confused mind"

So said an opinionated, deeply religious aunt of mine. She heard I was painting and wanted to find out what kind of art I was producing. So when I vaguely explained that it was a semi abstract kind of art, This was her retort. Well I was shocked, she hadn't even seen any of my work, so to be described as confused was extreme. I didn't say much after that. She didn't either.

It didn't change my approach to art. Which was largely intuitive and experimental. But her words stuck in my mind decades later. Maybe she was right. It has never been easy to explain or understand. You like it or you don't. It is always useful to try and get at some of the thoughts the artist perused as he worked.

Abstract art is wide ranging in style and content. Some abstract art is totally non-representational. No object is descernible. Other types of abstract art hint at objects, visible things, landscapes.

Modern art got its driving force at the turn of the 20th century. It was a new kind of thinking, it was essentially experimental, always exploring new ways, new thinking, new solutions, defying the traditional techniques. Thus no definition is absolute, except in its diversity. This is where the heated discussions and differences begin. The controversies are exposed, outlandish remarks are made, arbiters of "good taste" reject it outright, weak artist retreat to their studios, the works can gain notoriety, sometimes the artists gain a cult following, the media loves it.

Most people, on viewing modern art will say, "I don't understand this stuff!" But understanding is not what you'll find. Instead, modern art should be regarded in the same way you appreciate instrumental music, flowers, poetry, it's an appeal to the emotions, to the senses. For modern abstract art to be fully appreciated you have to drink it in, absorb it. It's an experiment to be enjoyed, or cautiously accepted or sometimes angrily rejected, as "the product of a confused mind." Such can be the effect on the senses.

What do you think? How do you feel about abstract art?