Latest posts by michael wilson (see all)
- JORDAN RIVER - February 5, 2019
- Inspired Art - August 2, 2018
- Waiting for Inspiration - July 31, 2018
- The Bridge between Painting and Photography - July 31, 2018
Visualizing abstract art projects is the essential first step in creating a painting. Visualizing (or developing a concept) is the process of creating a basic construct of the painting in your mind. Through practice this process can become a more natural and less forced mental effort. We all realize how incessant our mental activity is and often it is only with great difficulty that we can shut down our mental activity. The visualization comes by channeling that mental energy towards your goal of creating art. The mind then becomes a useful tool for the artist. We can play with images, move them around, distort them and place them in different arrangements to fit what we are imagining. This is not unlike a musician working up a new song or a choreographer imagining a dance routine or an athlete picturing a practiced extension to achieve a desired result.
This is however not always immediately effective. Patience is required. Sometimes our imagination will give us just a hint or suggestion and a sensitive artist will pay attention to this and meditate on this bare image. Personally I try to keep a sketch pad handy in several areas of the home or studio to quickly sketch the suggestion. These seem to be sub-conscious images that creep up in to our minds in small segments. I have found with practice I can freeze, in a sense, these images and then begin to develop them mentally. By directing our mind away from unimportant thoughts to those of the desired art image we begin to use our mental constructs to advantage. For the artist this visualizing process tends to go with the trade – artists by nature can ‘see’ the forms mentally. There are times when an image will keep re-occurring over and over when I meditate but nothing seems to follow. There seems to be nothing beyond the simple form presented, even after several days of mulling over that particular simple image. In those cases I will go out to the studio and prepare to paint that simple image. Often and remarkably after that initial start, the painting will begin to suggest the next form or color or shape. The painting then develops, for lack of a better word, organically. It seems to come from its own quite naturally. There is a sensitivity required to this natural development. Past experience is fused with these new developments. Personal preferences and color choices are employed to enhance the developing painting and curiously the imagination begins to expand as the painting develops.
Conversely a painting is often more thoroughly imagined before it is begun. In this case the visualization process is taken to a more complete stage. It is remarkable in these cases that a painting can be so substantially established even to the point of color selections. On these occasions it is essential to have a drawing pad handy to draw out the development. Fortunately once the drawings are made (and sometimes I will do several) the image becomes fairly locked in mentally. The drawings are signposts and I find that inevitably the painting will become considerably changed and refined as the paint is applied. In these cases I do draw out the visualized image on the canvas or board. Between these two extremes of something starting from just the smallest seed or idea and from a highly visualized starting point are many, many variations that artists employ to begin a painting. The point behind this article is to encourage the mental or meditation visualization process. With practice you will discover that it becomes a fairly natural process to use the mind as an effective tool – tool of the imagination. There seems to be a deep and vast wealth of sub-conscious material that is waiting to be discovered, waiting to be manifested by the abstract artist. The key is patience. Allow the images to come without forcing them but once they arrive (however small and insignificant) pay attention to them…begin the visualization process.