Retro 2- What I learnt in my early abstract painting period

My red phase merged into my abstract phase. In my abstract phase, I tackled my understanding of abstraction.

I found the painting of abstract form and colour was more challenging than I had originally thought.

I used my palette knife and various experimental techniques as a way of expressing myself. I came to realise that the shape of the canvas was very important in the creation of the abstract painting.

I found I used all my senses, not just my intellect, to determine where and how I would structure a painting to communicate an abstract idea through shape and colour. Geometric shapes had new meaning, particularly squares that came to represent land and countries.

This was a new experience for me, which I enjoyed.

I worked on my paintings until they ‘sat well with me’. Knowing when to stop painting was important, that knowledge has stayed with me ever since.

I also discovered that my finished abstract paintings resonated when they triggered a feeling in the viewer- even if that experience was hard for them to describe because it sat just out side of their conscious reach.

With that personal knowledge, I realised that I had discovered the power of paintings to bypass the conscious thought and tap into the unconscious. Was this the collective unconscious Jung referred to.

My abstract phase transformed to other stages of painting.- but that’s another story .

Extract for Wikipedia Abstraction (art) Typically, abstraction is used in the arts as a synonym for abstract art in general. Strictly speaking, it refers to art unconcerned with the literal depiction of things from the visible world—it can, however, refer to an object or image which has been distilled from the real world, or indeed, another work of art.^[13] Artwork that reshapes the natural world for expressive purposes is called abstract; that which derives from, but does not imitate a recognizable subject is called nonobjective abstraction. In the 20th century the trend toward abstraction coincided with advances in science, technology, and changes in urban life, eventually reflecting an interest in psychoanalytic theory.^[14] Later still, abstraction was manifest in more purely formal terms, such as color, freedom from objective context, and a reduction of form to basic geometric designs.^[15]

Jung and Archetypes

Jung argued that a collective unconscious and archetypal imagery were detectable in art. His ideas were particularly popular among American Abstract expressionists in the 1940s and 1950s.[13] His work inspired the surrealist concept of drawing imagery from dreams and the unconscious.