ABSTRACTION; A MEANS AWAY FROM TIGHTNESS.

S5 F                                                                                    © Ruth Zachary

After being an etching printmaker for 20 years, I found I was working in a very detailed precise style, and in fact, couldn't work in an impressionistic manner any more, as I had once. I had become tight, and controlled in my approach, and had lost the joyful freedom once so natural at another time.

Often I tried experimental painting to find my freedom, and often what I ended up with was a picture plane filled with detailed textures, exciting in some ways but unsatisfying in others, because I still was not finding a marriage between both meaningful imagery and freedom. I saved these experiments even if I rejected them as incomplete. I am so glad I did, and still use parts of them in work I am doing now.

I tried using pre-printed papers, hand printed papers,  painted papers, photographed textures; so many I cannot list them here. I cut them into shapes, geometric shapes at first, and then sometimes into organic shapes. Still, if there was any imagery in those pieces, I was compelled to see them as montages as I had when drawing etchings in montage style. Even patterns were often seen as realistic imagery which I would arrange into a "picture." Finally I knew this approach was not getting me where I wanted to go.

Next I tried thumbnail sketching, which only looked like inept drawings to me. Getting detailed would put me right back where I had been before.

I even played with Kid Pix, a program designed for children, with bright colors, and random generated options, as a way to loosen up. I worked rapidly, saving the compositions I liked, with a series of letters and numbers to identify them. The above geometric composition was one example. One reason this worked was, In a small-sized format there isn't room for detail, and the whole can be seen without focusing on details.

 These first attempts helped me to see the design as a two dimensional field that did not depend upon a recognizable image to make it pleasing to look at. Kid Pix has the capability of creating organic shapes and textures and to draw images, but I avoided that so I could break my obsessive habits. Kid Pix had a number of tools so that curved, geometric, patterned colors etc. were possible. I liked some of the compositions that resulted, and I learned how to put them into Photoshop so I could cut and paste at will, to create a pleasing non-objective composition. 

At this point I can create a well balanced composition, and I can make a complex realistic painting or collage. But I have not yet found the Middle Ground. My ideal would be to create both organic abstractions and detailed compositions at will, and to do either with all the joy the process of expression affords when it goes well.

Other artists may not wrestle with this kind of problem, but if they do, I hope some of my experiences

may be something they can relate to.