In my last entry, I said "Before photography was invented, the ultimate was to represent an image as the eye saw it". Actually one has to ask what does the eye see? Before the Camera Obscura, "the eye" saw things in oblique perspective, and before that, no perspective at all! 

David Hockney wrote a book ("Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters")  on the contention that the "secret" of almost all artists from the Renaissance to the 19th century used the Camera Obscura, which essentially projects an image onto a screen just like a pin-hole camera does. The artist vastly simplifies his task by essentially traceing a reverse image onto the canvas or paper. So it is really a primitive form of photography.

Our eyes are constantly flitting about, taking in a vast amount of what might seem to be a confusing array of light and colour. Yet we experience it as an unbroken continuous 3-dimensional space around us. It is the brain that is adjusting and reversing the effects of they eye and head movements. The brain is constantly simplifying and abstracting external reality to something else. It translates them to symbols for one thing, it interprets 2 separate 2-D images into 3-dimensions, so that we actually feel experience our existence in a 3 dimensional realm. It maps the whole world onto a whole internal encyclopedia of our preconceived notions and experiences, biases, predudices. It can also open doors to new ideas and ways of thinking.

That is, the seeing is done by the brain, or maybe more acurately, by the mind! Seeing is tied in with our whole experience of life.  It is no wonder art has so many branches, ideas and philosophies.

This is not to say all art is necessarily good or well-conceived. But be careful what judgments you make of a genre or an artist. Try to experience what they experience and think as you see a painting.

Sometimes one hears people wondering what the point is with abstract art. ("My child can do better!") For me a good abstract evokes a feeling of light and luminosity and sparks a part of your imagination and gets your creativity going, or maybe it takes you to "another place" where the cares of the world are but a distant memory.

Before photography was invented, the ultimate was to represent an image as the eye saw it. When photography came along, the art of painting re-invented itself, and probably had to. It is no accident that impressionism and expressionism arrived around the same time as photography. At the time, there was a huge reaction against Impressionism, but now we look at impressionist paintings with romantic longing to days when "artists really could paint"!

With the mechanical reproduction of images, the artists in general don't feel the need to communicate with exact representational images. Why compete with a machine that can capture images faster and more efficiently than a painter?

One finds very few artists dedicated to rendering "reality" the way it hits the eye. Yes, there are the Photorealists, and Hyper-realists, but even these forms show the vast superiority of the hand and mind compared to the camera. These schools aside, most artists like to stretch the concrete image by exaggerating colour, or deform the image from 3-dimensional perspective. The logical extension of this concept is to remove the symbol all together. Such artists often ask what is it about forms and colours that get you feeling a certain way. They started removing the symbolism of the concrete image. What is left is abstraction: the joy of expressing pure colour, pure energy: drawing a paint-laden brush across a surface leaving its trail behind. 

The difficulty is often that it doesn't fit into any preconceived notion or standard of what people consider art. But then art is always breaking old standards and creating new ones. Each artist has to some degree his or her own standards. All this makes abstract art generally difficult to appreciate. However armed with a different attitude, one could take the extra step and accept, if only for a moment, that abstract artist actually has something to say. One might then find that key that opens a new door. 

And if you think abstract art is easy, go ahead and try it!