Nearly All Abstract Art Sucks, including MINE.

In nearly all artistic disciplines, a certain level of training and technical skill is needed. For example, an architect needs to know how to draw, to understand building materials, how to create structures. A musician needs to know how to read notes, play scales, chords, create melodies, etc. Writes need to understand grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, spelling.

One sure way to determine if an painter is really an artist is to look at their drawings. Not paintings but drawings. In those, there is no room to hide. Andy Warhol could draw. Georgia O’Keefe could draw. That they chose to create works that were weird and unconventional is a testament to their creativity; they could create pretty pictures. But they elected not to. I suspect that is how the truly creative mind works. By the way, I have a very low level of creativity. That’s why I speculate.

On the other hand, take guys like Renoir, Jackson Pollack, Lee Krasner or Mark Rothko. Couldn’t draw a lick. So what did they do? Disguised their lack of artistic ability by doing weird things with colors, drippings, designs. As opposed to talented artists, these guys had no choice - they produced dreck because that is all they could produce.

Art critics, curators, collectors, etc. - unless they are working artists themselves - do not understand this very basic principle. They think someone like Cy Twombly is a true artist, like, say, Warhol, but voluntarily chose to create horrible, childish scrawls as an artistic statement. Nope. That is all Twombly could do.

I know it sounds so censurious and mean. But I kind of understand this because I myself do both figurative and abstract art. The former is about 100x harder and requires fundamental skills. If you make a mistake it shows. With abstract stuff, anything goes. In fact, look at the blue abstract painting in my portfolio section - do you think it matters which side is up? No! I painted this originally with the current bottom on top. Doesn’t matter.

Representational art takes a lot of planning, observation, technical skull and patience. And what it conveys to some extent is visual truth. Sargent’s portraits show the sitters as they appear. Matisse’s fishbowls and tables, even though they may look a bit strange, are accurate depictions of these objects, which look distorted when viewed with the naked eye. Abstract art does not convey this so its appeal if any is more like the appeal of mere design or color. Like a nice tablecloth.

Sorry.

Abstract Image