Abstract Nature

Many of our ideas for abstracting nature evolved from our efforts to redesign and perfect it. We build Edens, Paradises, and gardens of perfection through distillation and reduction. Long ago Japanese gardeners worked to rebalance and redesign nature to create a harmonious design suitable for meditation. Landscape painters from ancient China to our own 19^th century Hudson River painters redesigned their painted landscapes to build a coherent, theatrical and spiritual evocation of nature.  These artists simplified and distilled their experience. They abstracted nature from their observations and an inherited canon of designs.

To illustrate how we can rebalance and perfect nature I offer examples 1 and 2. Example 1 presents a closely cropped intimate view of flora, a small corner of nature whose structure depends on counterpointing fronds framing two vertically aligned flowers. But those flower blossoms are suspiciously oriented along the same angle and, in the same direction.  To perfect and rebalance the design I cloned and reoriented the bottom blossom as you see in example 2.

Example 1. Suspiciously coincidentally aligned flower blossoms.

Example 2. Re-balanced blossoms to create the counterpoint sensation of a zigzag.

Finding abstract patterns in nature can depend upon visual metaphors. These metaphorical suggestions redirect our attention to a pattern not inherently present in the nominative subject matter. Consider example 3 which presents a photo of a puddle with plants. The negative shape of a silver bird with its wings spread creates a new pattern which hovers between the symbolic, the abstract and the representational.

Example 3. Silver Bird, a photo of a pond with a metaphorical birdlike shape.

Connie Z. Reider, the photographer in example 4, presents a photographic negative print in which the river offers a stringy, wavy pattern of flowing hair. This metaphor steals our attention away from the rest of the narrative image to give us new, alternative, abstract readings.

Example 4. Photograph. 2005 by Connie Z. Reider.

The current Issue of Art in America features the painter, Josephine Halvorson whose meanderings offer found abstractions with almost unidentifiable objects presented in a Philip Guston-like painterly style.  Her out-of-context croppings of small square fields generate a sensation of abstraction co-habiting with realism. See example 5.

Example 5. Josephine Halvorson, Mine Ground (Fossil), gouache on paper,

My own wanderings recently brought me to a lily pond on the perimeter of the Catskills State Park in New York. An old willow tree shaded one corner of the pond.   Along with a few other artists in my painting workshop I shot a variety of photos through the hanging willow branches. Here was an image presenting both legibility as well as uncertainty.  Example 6 shows how I began the painting as an abstraction which would eventually move through steps (examples 7 and 8) toward more legibility but, still clinging to the original feeling of abstraction.

Example 6. Step one, the abstract beginning referring only to color and vertical orientation of the pattern.

Example 7.Step two, the vertical sweep receives layered multidirectional texturing.

Example 8. Step three, the introduction of background light shapes.

Example  9. Step four, the image in its current state.