Abstract Art: 5 artists

October 22, 2020

Abstract Art: 5 artists

Agnes Martin

She is so inspirational and such a wonderful artist. She believed her work to be inspired by spiritual feelings and aimed to created a true beauty. To achieve this she acted with subtlety, repetitions of grids and stripes of varying sizes, depths and widths develop a understanding of the beauty of geometry and the use of this to create calming and sensitive images. With a muted colour palate and delicate use of media she provides a meditative space for contemplation.

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/agnes-martin

‘When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not just in the eye. It is in the mind. It is our positive response to life.’
Agnes Martin

Cy Twombly

HIs work really spoke to me as a teenager, I was very inspired by the blend of rushed automatic text and gestural marks and layers. It felt like a real expression of inner angst. Another painter who uses a limited colour palette, although certainty not subtle in Twombly’s case. The marks often appear quite visceral in deep reds and pinks, raw and wound like. Although apparently loose and quickly made the marks are so considered and the composition for me is the real underpinning of the brilliance of the work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/books/review/joshua-rivkin-chalk-cy-twombly-biography.html

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/twombly-quattro-stagioni-autunno-t07889

JMW Turner

To me Turner was a maverick, his paintings are a shining light in art history, the fact that his works were popular at the time of painting is testament to his skill. Turner is the master of light and movement. His seascapes swirl and crash about the canvas, they are abstract in nature, I suppose abstracting this movement and using the paint to give dominance this and the changing lights, rather than dwelling on careful representations of the waves, which of course you can’t ever do as they are in constant change.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-seascape-with-storm-coming-on-n04445

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-seascape-with-distant-coast-n05516

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/joseph-mallord-william-turner-558

Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay makes me hopeful, she stood as her own artist although married to one and mixing with the Paris Avante-Garde, she could have easily receded into the back ground and gotten lost as we know many artist-wives did. Her work is rooted in colour Theory and the ideas that opposing colours can make each other sing and move. Her circular shapes in the Simulatanism style developed by her and her husband vibrate and turn on the canvas. She also worked in textiles and costume design, abstraction not dissimilar to repetitious fabric prints. Her patchwork dresses were made in a kind of automatic style rooted in this shape and colour investigation she was making.

Below I am showing textile work and her sketch work which allows me to take a step back from her canvases and see how she was working in other media to achieve overall visual outcomes.

Sean Scully

I watched a documentary about this artist last year on BBC 4, he describes himself as The most well-known artist you’ve never heard of, or something to that affect. He is selling extremely well and is very rich by the sounds of it and he is very happy to talk about this, I have to say I didn’t warm to him. He paints rapidly and thickly with huge brushes and pots of paint, the works take shape quickly. This of course is due to knowledge and skill, you can’t make a good painting in 5 minutes if you don’t know what you’re doing. He began working in his signature striped patterns early on in his career but this has evolved over the years to striped fields, Almost flag- like. He often uses a tonal range and this allows different elements to move in and out of the canvas, creating a 3D effect.

Diagonal Light, 1972