A Strictly Personal Point of View…

otherwise, frankly, would would be the point?

If it’s a definition we need, we’d hit Wiki, right? So let’s cut out the foreplay.

click me baby for art's sake

I’m always fascinated to meet and read about talented people who have been submerged in a world of creativity from the beginning, it makes for great conversation. I was privileged to meet one such individual, the gifted sculptor Ros Newman, who was raised around art royalty, the likes of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth & Ben Nicholson. I have to admit, I was pretty star-struck with Ros’s recollections, which she found highly amusing.

My roots by modern standards are modest, being of first generation Serbian stock, family life was more about survival than creativity, we we’re pretty low on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I’ve been painting and drawing from a very early age, but earnest exposure to art started at university where I began exploring dada and surrealism. Revelation came when I first made eye contact with a Mark Rothko painting, I remember thinking to myself, are people really allowed to paint like that? Which instantly translated to Shit, I should be painting like that! I had no idea how, but I knew from that moment that I would. Rothko was very aware of his paintings potential to provoke religious experience in the observer, and it certainly did in me. And not just as a result of his extraordinary painting, but by Rothko’s ability to convey the spiritual in his work; every painting is another piece from his soul, he understood both intuitively and intellectually that personal growth was about process. I was overwhelmed.

I find painting from observable reality very dull, and still do, it’s just not my bag. And yet I have always been fascinated with creating on a blank canvas. Looking back on some of my much earlier attempts as a teen, I now realise that the urge to abstraction was always there, but didn’t know how to express itself with any meaning. Rothko was my first teacher and I’m still distance-learning. The Late Series exhibition at Tate Modern was an emotional and spiritual experience, it was like walking around a true church, of the soul.

Abstraction is like great sex and the purest love all rolled into one; it just hits the spot. A language of and for the soul, abstraction is a collection of symbols, movements and moments like hammers hitting piano strings, to paraphrase Kandinsky. A great abstract work doesn’t look like anything, and so we automatically look inward for points of reference. I’ve noticed that when viewing art created by others, it either works for me or it doesn’t. Why is that? It’s as if a hand shoots out from the image, reaches into my gut, grabs it really hard and refuses to let go. Thank you and goodnight, it’s like love at first site, a good vibration.
Ultimately all matter is vibration; light hits the retina and the brain attempts to make sense of it, when in fact the light is already speaking to the heart, which then translates for the soul. The language of abstraction is the language of light, it’s kundalini energy charged, erotically esoteric and esoterically erotic. And so the artistic process is synonymous with the journey to enlightenment.

Painting abstract is having sex with God, while the painting itself is proof that I did.

V

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