So You Don’t Do Abstract!

I'm looking at my lawn and reflecting on the necessity of mowing and thinking about a strange conversation I had yesterday. My nasty medical run in has made me reflect on the (perhaps) lack of time left to me to get out there and put my art out there and so instead of procrastinating (I'm a master in procrastination) I decided to make some calls and get some info! 

This incidentally is what I'm looking at while ruminating on the (lack of) success of my action, in the words of Homer Simpson ''Trying is the first step to failure'' and so my strange conversation began with wanting some information about a local art event in Autumn. 

Having finally found a contact person, I enthusiastically launched in to a brief description of who I am and what my work is about. Why I love pastels and how the themes of my work go deeper than just the contemporary landscape per se, my work plays with the concept of liminal spaces, the search for roots and awareness of how precious and ephemeral our landscape is,  more specifically landscape paintings are a like a Time Capsule. Folks, it’s disappearing all around us, what will future generations still have? 

My passionate discourse, was followed by the following ….  … So you don’t do abstract? And there we have the crux of it no I do not. 

Landscapes belong firmly in the field of representational art and that alongside the clunky expression for it in German ''Gegenständlichen Kunst'' is at present a seemingly dirty word here! In the past German art groups like the Blaue Reiter and die Brücke showed that landscape painting has its validity in every epoch, and the German/Austrian artist Anselm Kiefer (one of the best selling artists of the world) has used his epic landscapes to deal with Germany's historical past. Themes like war, mythology, politics and religion are all reflected in his work; landscapes aren’t all about romanticism and Caspar David Friedrich.

No, I don’t do abstract! I do contemporary landscapes, I want to make people see what we have around us, the beauty and fragility, the transience, awareness for our environment, escape from ugliness and brutality. Does art have to be splashy, brash and does it have to be done with big brushes? 

I've seen so many abstract/expressive exhibits that they don’t seem to differ, I want more from art and no I'm not suggesting that I have more to offer or better but just something different and maybe that’s why I don’t do abstract!