Abstract Art

Rachel Walla

 “I don’t get it. It looks like something a 5-year-old could have done.”

  These types of statements are often what surround the viewing of abstract art. And it’s true; a lot of the time, the subject being studied does look like amateur scribbles. But there is more to abstract art, and if you understand the concept, maybe you will appreciate the idea a bit more than before.

  The first time anyone explained it to me; I was in eighth grade at a local art show. The artist was foreign and for some reason was travelling through Montana displaying his art at local galleries. He showed me a multi-media picture that was all blurred yellows and greens. I said, “I don’t get it.” “Do you like abstract art?” he asked me. I had about as much experience with abstract art as I had with Kung Fu. “Um, I don’t know,” I replied, a little embarrassed. “Abstract art isn’t about representing exactly what you see,” he explained, “it’s about conveying some other sense of the time and place.”

   I looked at his abstract paintings for a long time after that, trying to understand what was being shown. Most art I understood was an artist’s attempt to re-create some image they had seen. The visual was supposed to be either life-like or pretty in my eighth-grade mind. These designs on the gallery wall were neither. They were stupid, blurry and looked as if they took no skill whatsoever.

   I looked and studied and finally stepped back and quit focusing so hard. Then, I saw. The yellow and green blurry picture wasn’t a detailed, obvious depiction of the sun-setting over a grassy field, but sure enough, that’s what it was. It wasn’t the image looking like the field, it was that the lighting, the colors and the warmth that the painting seemed to convey. It couldn’t have been anything else. I had seen many summer fields like that before, and I knew how they looked and felt in the early evenings. The artist came by again and asked what I thought. I shyly told him my theory of what the painting was and he had me step forward to look at the title. It said, “Summer Wheat, Townsend, MT.” I got it, I even liked it, because it didn’t come right out and say what it was but it conveyed more than just the image, it conveyed the warmth and the wind and the feel of a wheat field in the summer.

   I still don’t “get” a lot of abstract art. I honestly still think some artists just like to paint squiggles rather than proper images. But when I do see a piece that I understand, I sometimes like abstract best because it doesn’t just paint a picture, it appeals to the sense of a feeling, time, and place. In its elusive way, abstract art, when done well, can communicate more of the experience than a blunt image, but I usually find you have to give it a little more time to do so.