Thursday, October 26, 2006

“Does this qualify as an abstract?” My artist friend asks me. He wants to enter the piece in a juried show – for abstracts only. At first look, his paintin of surfers reclining on a beach doesn’t seem astract. After all, I just told you what the images are. I went to the internet to find definitions of Abstract Art and foudn the since the surfers, beach and water are loosely depicted more as simple shapes and lines with the emphasis on overall design, that the painting could be called abstract.

The definitions of abstract art are as various as the form itself. In a very broad definition, all art is abstract, since line, shape, form, and color are the elements of the designs no matter how representational a piece is intended to be. At the other end of this continuum is non-objective art where the representation of “real” objects is completely absent.

The most helpful definition I found from tvdecorators.com where abstract art is said to be an art expression in which the artistic values reside in the forms and colors rather than in the reproduction or presentation of subject matter. Where the expression resides...

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