Playing with Abstraction

One of the things that draws me to another artist’s work is the painterly quality of their paintings. In particular I love landscapes painted in an impressionist style with short brushstrokes working together to create the image. I have visited the Group of Seven galleries at the AGO many times over the years to admire the textures and brushstrokes in their paintings.

I will listen to classical music as I stop at each painting, imagining the landscape they were looking at and finding the surprises they created for the viewer. An unexpected colour in the landscape or a brush of paint that mixed colours as it passed across the canvas are some of my favourite things to look for. The paintings I spend the most time with are smaller and were possibly painting en plein air. I look to see evidence of quick, decisive brushes of colour to catch the light before it changed. There is a looseness and freeness to the paintings that I find to be very challenging to paint myself which is why I admire it so much in others.

In December I started a series that I am hoping will help me loosen up my painting style when I am out painting en plein air. I have been selecting a photo I’ve taken from somewhere in the world and then I am trying to capture the essence of the landscape. I do four paintings for each photo try to paint more and more abstractly in each progressive painting. I’m not sure how successful I am being at keeping things loose, but I feel like I am moving in the right direction.

So far I have tried an Icelandic mountain landscape and an image from the Valley of Fire in Nevada. I am exploring different colour choices and limiting myself to 5 colours per painting. I have been enjoying reducing the landscape to its simplest form and trying to convey the image through colour.

So why do it?

Well, I have found that over the last couple of years, the paintings I have liked the most from when I paint en plein air are the ones where I keep things loose. In those paintings I focused more on drawing in the shadows and the light and placing colour where I saw or imagined it to be. The ones that I haven’t like as much are ones where I got tight too quickly and mired myself in the details. Not only did those paintings take twice as long as the ones I loved, but they also felt more like illustrations and less painterly.

It’s my hope that when I practice through this series I will get better at keeping the looseness and spontaneity that I desire. The beauty of art is that it is a work in progress and there is always more to learn and try and experiment with. I’m not sure how this series will end or what I will do with it when it’s done, but I am thoroughly enjoying the journey.

Hoping you are also finding time to explore something new this year.

Laura