What Am I Thinking when I paint an Abstract Painting?

Some people may think that abstract art is mindless doodling or totally incomprehensible. It is the exact opposite. Making an abstract painting is incredibly difficult because the artist has to plan a painting by reaching into their emotional inner consciousness and have that come out in a structured form that expresses their feelings. The form could be abstract expressionist that is free and apparently spontaneous painting, or geometric abstraction, or something in between. The forms can change, too, as the painting is being developed.

The role of the artist is to create something that, when viewed by an observer, evokes unconscious feelings and emotions that might be similar to those the artist may have had. Or, the viewer may bring their own experience to the work and see something totally different.

My paintings are created in series with the idea of developing variations on a particular theme. Each of the series contains a large number of paintings that develop the theme. I have selected a sample from these paintings to demonstrate the kind of art I am creating. The entire series can be seen at Julie Richman Abstract Original Art

These paintings began with an idea. I wanted to paint on a black background in order to give the shapes a certain luminescence in order to achieve my goal of simulating transparency. I also wanted to restrict the color scheme and only use a set number of shapes. These shapes then were to be repeated with each new painting, but somehow transformed.

The black paintings are part of a series concerned with the idea of the canvas as a stage within which semi-geometric shapes become abstract characters that appear to either be moving or remain static. The color scheme and the shapes are similar but are in different compositions in relation to one another. In all the paintings the shapes are touching each other and are seen as either on top of each other or behind each other. An illusion of transparency is created but the space of the painting is ambiguous. The emotional content is concerned with feelings of closeness and distance, of decorum and informality. The art object itself is a performance choreographed by my imagination.

The transformation of everyday life into abstraction is the foundation of my art expression. Everything I see and all of my experiences — visual and psychological— change into symbolic representations expressed as abstract form and color. The shapes I invent become signals functioning as stimuli to the viewer’s imagination and invite individual observation and response. Repetitions of specific shapes as well as the use of geometric and organic forms create an illusion of movement and the passage of time.

My art offers an exploration into an invented, fantastic world where esthetic and visual pleasure assure intellectual and emotional awareness. I believe artists have within them an unconscious visual dictionary which is always referred to in their work and which is a part of their expressive language. This personal autograph exists for realist painters and for abstract artists like myself.