The Painter's Path III - Making Abstract Art in an Age of Artifice
**Five Positions of the Essential and Contingent in Contemporary Abstract Painting:**1. The Contingent within the Essential. Looking at the overall composition see all the components of the painting. What hierarchy has developed?What needs to go and what needs to remain? What is the general tone or feel to the work? How do the particulars function within the general spread of the work? Do the particulars move the work or remain isolated? Is the general sweep of the painting hindered by the “small stuff”?
The Essential within the Contingent. Within the hive of busyness of particulars is there a broad movement toward what may be “essential” or absolutely necessary? Can you behold the “essence” of the painting? What is its nature? Where does its heart beat? Is the essential overwhelmed by the contingent, the uncertainty, the minor? Does it all seem too conditional?
Arriving within the Essential. Once noted subtraction aesthetics comes into play. This is a pruning process that allows the work to grow or blossom like a flower. It opens up the composition, it allows the eye to be untrammeled. The “trick” is knowing what to sacrifice. Arriving within the essential is the work of editing, thought. It is standing-back and doing what is immediately necessary.
Approaching from the Contingent. This is approaching the universe through a grain of sand. How is this happening in the work? Does it occur through editing, cutting out of things extraneous? Or, can one use the contingent (guest) to make the essential (host) look good? How can one make use of spontaneity, the accidental, to stir the broth of essence of the work?
Arriving at Concurrence. Concurrence means that the complementary opposites of the essential and the contingent, the general and the particular, those shifting degrees that are dialectic, converge and converse in abstract process painting.
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