Why I Paint Abstract Art
Like so many people, I stopped painting after I left school. I wasn’t particularly ‘good’ at it so it fell by the wayside. Years later, when I moved into a new home, I found myself daydreaming about setting up a little corner with an easel and brushes. I have no idea where this image came from, it just felt like something I wanted to do. One day, I even picked up a paint tester and brush in a hardware store and spent an evening just seeing what it felt like to feel the brush on the page. I felt a bit silly and it was another couple of years before I bought a pocket watercolour set and started splashing some colour around on blank pages. I tried to paint ‘things’. Faces or trees. But I really had no idea what I was doing and every time I tried to mix colours, well, they all seemed to turn into an unappealing purpley brown mess.
Rather than get frustrated, I decided it was time to go back to school and I booked a class with a watercolour artist who I’d spotted on Instagram, Emma Block. It was brilliant and opened my eyes to the basics of colour mixing. Excitingly I had actually painted some flowers and they actually looked like flowers. I set up a corner of my lounge with my paints to encourage me to just pick them up when I came home from work and I began to practice.
By this time, I’d started illustrating as well. Drawing my illustrations digitally gave me the luxury of the ‘undo’ button and I could draw more precisely. I needed a lot more practice to be able to control the watercolours in the same way and I wasn’t sure I had the patience. I had, however, learnt how to create the colours I wanted so I would paint swatches of colours of various shades to relax. Soon I found myself simply making marks. Letting the patches of colour seep in to each other and shape themselves rather than fighting it and this is what started to resonate with me. I realised that, for me, painting wasn’t about ‘control’. Rather, it was about letting go and allowing the paints to do what they wanted. And it felt liberating.
I added embellishments. So the paint would flow and merge and shape and I would then add little flickers of gold or words that felt right for the piece and create something that was a mix of unintentional and intentional.
Although I loved watercolours, I sometimes found that I wanted something bolder and a creative friend suggested I try using acrylics. I bought a starter kit and again, not knowing what I was doing, started splashing paint around on the page. It felt like something else altogether. More expressive, louder, somehow more powerful and for that moment in my life, with all that it was throwing at me, they simply resonated more with me.
I found myself picking a colour, roughly knowing where I was going to put the brush, then closing my eyes and letting the paint do what it wanted. I would open my eyes between strokes and often be surprised by how the painting looked, how the colours merged or showed through each other. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But it didn’t matter. It was teaching me to let go of control. Let go of judgement. And simply to enjoy creating. I would still add embellishments (with my eyes open!) but they were always from my gut, not my mind.
With life asking so much of us all, I feel like creating abstract art allows me to stop thinking, stop trying to solve or fix anything. I’m not trying to *say* anything in particular with my pieces, in fact, I love that people see what they want to see. Friends have described my swaying abstracts as looking like books, a cake, a flamingo, all sorts of things! I paint what resonates with me and people see what resonates with them. And it feels like there’s a lot of freedom in the simplicity of that.
Click here to see some of my latest paintings. I hope that they encourage you to pick up a brush and swish some paint around too.
