Abstraction

"Villars from Afar"

8 x 13

One of the painters whose blog I follow is Colin Page. Colin recently posted a painting of an old bicycle, and wrote about how he created some abstraction within a representational painting. It was a wonderful post, and he explained so clearly his thought process and decisions about what to "abstract".

 

One technique Colin wrote about was "lost edges". I have previously posted about this approach in  "Not Too Edgy". The play of lost and found edges makes a painting interesting, and it involves the viewer much more than a perfectly delineated painting. I tried to use lost edges in the village scene shown above. Rather than drawing each roof, I simply chose one color shape for a part of the village, and then broke the lines up with the green of the trees.

Colin also described his use of calligraphic brush strokes in the foreground of his painting. He was looking for an opportunity to use some lyrical lines, and found it in the grasses. That is the same thing I was doing with the foreground of the painting above. There was a large stretch of vineyard in the immediate foreground, and I simply wanted to suggest it by means of bright green brushstrokes, and a few dark strokes for the shadows between the vines. I liked the overall effect, and have posted the painting as the cover photo from my website.