The word “abstraction” is itself confusing. It can range between a slight “blurring” to full-blown expressionistic mayhem. We know it when we see it, we react to it instinctively. It is a spice that’s been added to our diet over centuries.
When I am painting, I have, as a goal, to inspire in the viewer a feeling of “I know it’s not real, but it could be”. I try to give the painting what the viewer already has in his/her “model of reality”; that is, things like gravity, light and shadow, wind, interactions of objects, etc.
But then I try to challenge that model. There is a tension created when the viewer isn’t quite sure of what he/she is looking at. That tension triggers the viewer’s subconscious story-telling and emotions. In the last century, the literary surrealists first juxtaposed words that usually didn’t go together to create this tension, and quickly the surrealist painters used visual objects in the same way. For example, they would put an umbrella and a fish together and that would trigger the viewer to ask why and then perhaps make up a possible reason for the scene. This is abstraction on a different level.
One of the techniques of Dali was the use of layers of composition. One layer might be seen as two women standing but another layer might be a man’s head using the women’s heads as his eyeballs. Your brain has to work out the perspective and then resolve the model. This tension is the abstraction.
Dali would also take familiar objects and distort them, stretching or combining them to give another tension to the composition. This, too, is abstraction, all designed to engage you, and make you think and feel.
I have tried to add my own layers of abstraction into my painting. One layer is the “objects” in the composition. Most are not “everyday” things, but are shapes and textures and colors that are made up. This is so that the viewer must try to interpret and put these objects into their model of reality. So, questions like “where did that come from?” or “why is that thing doing that?” will arise.
Another layer of abstraction is also happening here. I am attempting to give a view of a surrealist landscape when you stand six yards away, and then changes when you view from six feet away, and yet another when you look from six inches away. This (hopefully) invites the viewer to get closer. It also breaks the painter’s rule of detailing in the foreground and blurring the background. I consider all of this to be abstraction.
These final layers of abstraction to me are the reason that I call my work New Surrealism. I have appropriated the term from a wonderful book by Robert Zeller of the same name, which I would especially recommend to working painters.