Abstract Expressionism and What Artists Do
I took a watercolor abstracts workshop today with Sterling Edwards. Mr. Edwards is a Midwestern/Southerner who worked as a cop and firefighter before becoming an artist in his retirement thirty years ago. He does watercolor landscapes, flowers, abstracts, and sells his own brush line and workshops. He’s an artist more in the way that Thomas Kinkade is an artist than in the way that Kara Walker is an artist.
I’m at the stage in my artistic development where I have something to learn from both Thomas Kinkade and Kara Walker, I think, even if I’m not too sure exactly what lesson I’m supposed to be taking from either end of the artistic continuum, or where I will ultimately fall along it.
I’ve taken courses from Mr. Edwards in landscapes — by accident, mostly — but the courses from him that I’ve truly enjoyed have been his workshops on creating abstract work in watercolor. I enjoy them a lot, even though I don’t think, when I graduate from metaphorical Arts College with my imaginary MFA, that I will be an abstract expressionist.
What I love about art and making in general is the idea of conceiving something wonderful or astonishing or funny in my imagination and then manifesting it in the world. The creatives I admire the most are mainly women, outside the art world ecosystem, who desire pretty and fascinating and important things and seemingly just grow them, like Jack’s Beanstalk, apparently from the heat generated between their own two palms — Jordan Ferney, Betsy Hinze, Gabrielle Blair. There are also conceptual artists I deeply admire, who also engage in alternative, imaginative, more conceptual, worldbuilding/installation-making, that does fit in an art world ecosystem, but which is political, social, and always a little bit eccentric and magical — Fluxus, the Kienholzes, Aaron Gach.
I like installations. I like magic. I like building a better world and showing it to you. Making a living by making pretty paintings that could furnish hotels is not the kind of artmaking that excites me. And yet what I love about these abstract workshops is how opposite they are of the kind of artmaking I really aim to do. Creating an abstract in watercolor — an unforgiving, wayward medium in the best of times — is about letting go of vision and control, and letting the moment lead you. You can’t have any particular outcome in mind. You’re just playing: What if I make a mark there? What if I mix these colors? When should I press forward to make this composition even more whatever it is, and when should I stop before I ruin it? It’s about making marks, enjoying making marks, and enjoying both a process and the outcome of the created piece. It’s making something not out of my vision but out of my lived experience in the moment.
I take my paints and my brushes and my paper, and I do something for a little while, and then there is something at the end. I turn it left, right, upside down, to find the right orientation for it, so I can sign it. I’m just playing with my paints, but magic has occurred: You can put it in a frame, and it is a work of art. Good, bad, who knows, but anyone would say so, anyone could recognize this as art. It is no longer a sheet of paper. It is clearly not a mistake. It would be at home in a frame, under a mat, in an art gallery, in a hotel, in the bathroom of the suburban house, in the heavy paper art magazine with a caption, a date, a name. It is mysterious: What is this that I have made?
Mr. Edwards notes that people project their own narratives onto an abstract piece, creating a story or a composition when none was really there, and that — for art sales purposes — you can encourage this with enigmatic, one-word titles for your pieces onto which an art buyer can attach personal relevance that makes your artwork more saleable.
Humans are meaning makers. We can take any series of abstract, meaningless, even harmful and traumatic events, and scry into them like fortunetellers with a cup full of tea leaves: Having only the bare minimum of stray brown stains against a broken cup to start with doesn’t stop us. Out pops a story, a future, a hope, a reason for the color and shapes that have spilled onto the pages of our lives. That bowl of tea leaves becomes meaningful, ordered, perhaps even divine: It was the map out of hell, it was the thing that saved me, it was the way I survived, it was a gift from God. The primary colors dashed on the white paper under the gray mat in the black frame that is titled “Mother,” is now worth $3,000, because of the story we constructed for ourselves about the marks, that offered us a way to forgive someone who never loved us quite enough.
(Aaron Gach, incidentally, once created a work of art where he asked viewers to construct the perfect bank robbery. The piece was a contest; the prize was $1,000. He wanted to display the $1,000 cash prize in a briefcase in the gallery. The gallery balked: “You can’t put $1,000 in cash on a pedestal in here!” He said, “But every other work of art in this gallery costs more than $1,000?” So they had to let him, because otherwise they would have had to admit what they really thought the art they’d curated was worth.)
And maybe that’s why the piece is worth $3,000. Maybe that’s the point, what we love about art. It is taking the random detritus and garbage of the world and reconstructing it into new meanings, that hopefully generate a creative alternative to the garbage and trauma we would otherwise be forced to live with, like shit stains on the walls. I’m thinking of Afroman, creating a song out of the random accident of lemon pound cake on the counter and a broken door the cops crashed through, and hopefully minting that into money and a bright spotlight that he can use to personally heal from and collectively prevent the shitty trauma that inspired the song in the first place.
As Shawn Colvin said, about breakups, “Well, at least you got a song out of it.” Whether abstracts in watercolor or rap about police: Artists scrape up the fragments and make something better.
How are you constructing meaning from nonsense these days? What kind of art do you like and believe in? Are you more Thomas Kinkade or more Kara Walker? Let us know in comments, and — as ever — like, comment, share, and subscribe for more.