Painting in 2012
As a contemporary artist - more specifically a painter - I feel that I was born in to abstraction. It was the all-pervading norm, like formal landscapes or Impressionism must have felt in their day. But we also know that 'Abstraction' as a movement has had it's hay day, and we were born in it's persistent and lingering haze. It is only now that we can really get a grip on what it was, and what it gave us. It's time to wake up, and move on.
The abstracting painters of Europe and America in the early to mid 1900s worked tirelessly to break bonds with recognisable tropes, and instead to push themselves - alone and collectively - out in to a region, or void, of originality and visual self-sufficiency. Much like the eras of representative art before, the successes of the Abstract Expressionists, the Minimalists, and action painting in general were so dominating in the methodological techniques that I feel - to reiterate - any child born on the late 20th century had an almost natural predilection to 'know' abstraction in the creative world over formal representation.
Why am I pointing this out? Well, I feel it is a long over due topic: the exploration of what the golden age of abstract painting's lasting effects have been on us painters/artists, and to ask where we now find ourselves.
With the increasing benefit of hindsight, we have been given an age of total material and technical experimentation to draw from, and to be inspired by. There was nothing this generation of artists didn't do with paint, to push it and throw it and mould it until it took on a life of it's own, more pervasive than any 'subject'. The inner meaning and possibilities of our actions, that is what we unquestioningly had at our disposal in the classrooms as we grew up.
But, here and now, I find our painter's epoch to be beginning anew. Although emboldened by our elder's efforts, we have long been in an atmosphere where we feel inclined to go out on our own and find the roots of our natural expressions. We have to acknowledge that we may not have the strength in numbers that once seemed so romantic about the 50's and 60's in America or Europe in the 1900's. We now stand alone, frighteningly aware that our every mark made, every colour, every brush stroke carries the weight of our notions and ideas, and that in fact to 'be abstract' is impossible. And, moreover, to try and be abstract is both abhorrent and a paradox. As the elders rung every drop out of purely material experimentation, we now have the opportunity to re-imbibe every gesture with personality, emotion, even subjects in the natural world.
We are almost at the anti-crux of the beginnings of conscious abstraction in painting, because - with our tools and our motivation - we are now readying ourselves to head back out in to the world, and meet it head on. To speak our varied and differing voices that - though grown from the same ground - are becoming more orientated around our idiosyncratic lives and surroundings.
So - having held subjectivity at arms length just long enough for material triumphs to be crowned - we must now put the lessons of the abstractors to work, take our tools back out in to nature, and put everything they gave us to work in the context of our own search for 'what comes next'. To put it broadly: The subjectivity of the 1800's, the objectivity of the 1900's, the fusion of both towards ? in the 2000s.
See you out in the field.
Al Greenall
12.01.2012
Norway
