How does one understand abstract painting? Abstract arts? Abstract design? Abstract ideas?
Throughout my life advocating people into getting into arts, ive found and had conversations with countless types of people from different levels of understanding in abstract arts.
You can check the minted drawings on my Pentas account here
But the 2 extreme commentary would be as follows;
- “Abstract arts are usually pretentious. They make believe an idea, and keep hold on to it, and make others believe in them. Other than that, they are usually nothing.”
- “Theyre just games for those elites, only they would understand what those works means, its not our level to understand them.”
To start to do abstract paintings have always on my list of things to do, one of biggest curiousity on how well will i fit in with the processes of making them. But to start doing them is the biggest challenge, even before i started them!
Abstract arts was never my forte, and its been a very big mystery to me on why haven’t i get to start them yet. And some of the problems was identified as follows;
- I need reasons; to simply draw with no reasons have always been the big wall for me to start to do any artwork. I believe i can pretty much do, learn and understand any making techniques, on any subjects and develop any kind of thinking and processes, but without a means or a reason to start an artwork, i would never be able to. Let it be commissioned, challenged, explaining something to someone or whatever reason, mindless drawings are impossible to me.
- What style suits me? Not sticking to any one subject matter, wide range of exploration, and nonapparent distinct character of my body of work have made it hard to make a decision to choose which path to move forward.
- It is an investment: money and time. Of course, to start an actual painting you will be needing supplies, it will require some costing and in need of sustainable planning on how to spend my time efficiently to cater both.
- Inferiority complex; i dont think im good in doing this.
Lines & Strokes | Pastel Series
Recently ive had a go to explore abstract drawings in my own way, as a means of understanding. I tried to overcome those listed problems above with some strategies;
- Follow a prompt; during the time, one of our fellow KLSketchnation member whos also a close friend Emeir Faizal (or emeirsquisy) have just launched a 30 days abstract prompt list which generates a list of songs to be the everyday ‘reasons’ for my artworks.
- I wanted a mindless approach to the making of the artworks (which obviously failed from the start with all these analyses and thoughts :p) but i think its a bit impossible for me. To solve this, i finally decided that i wanted to focus on one thing that i am known by, line sketches. I close
- So i put it in a way, i set a time limit with just one medium, minimizing the cost and time to complete each one.
- I just went with it, without judging myself in earlier stage by planning to only do when the whole series are done.