How realistic is too representational to be abstract?

04.11.2024

It’s been over a month since my last post but I’ve been busy outside of the studio and the creation of this series. I am working on finding a full time design job so I gave that site a complete overhaul and I’ve been aggressively filling out applications. I also completed my 100 day challenge that I started on January 1, 2024 and organized all of the small works on paper in an online shop for sale starting tomorrow. I’ve also been traveling a bit which means my studio practice has mostly been confined to my sketchbook.

With all of that said, here’s what I’ve been thinking about after completing the latest painting in my Venice series. When building the compositions and executing them at a larger scale, is there a degree of representation that makes the work more realistic than abstract? Does it matter? Should the degree of representation be consistent across the series? With this latest work, the eighth in the series, I was considering that I went too far in trying to imitate the actual texture of the graffiti and wall on the right and that maybe the indication of plant life was painted too realistically. I think using local color instead of the imagined palettes I have used in recent years lends itself to the inclination towards representing real textures and objects. But as a whole the composition remains abstract because of the collage-focused process I am using to compose the paintings in the first place. Maybe including some degree of realism helps tell my story in a more obvious way? Maybe building these “structures” with indications of real bits like the architecture and sky will allow for a greater connection with the viewer? A new space made up of parts of the actual space.

I think it’s ok to mix up the degree of realism and abstraction within one painting, within one series. I have always thought about my work as representational abstraction and maybe this is a broad scale that continues to fluctuate with each body of work.