Expressing the Abstract LifeBy John

When I was in my “tweens” (13 – 17), my worldview seemed to be easily codified and easily described in a sentence or two. It didn’t take me very long to articulate and talk about what I loved doing, what my goals were, what type of people I gravitated towards, what I wanted to say to the girl I liked and what moments I felt good about myself.

Superimposed over an art form, it seemed that my life could have been depicted using pencil-drawn stick figures and distinct polygons, lightly outlined by solid, black and gray lines and overlaid with light shades of primary and secondary colors. The art form is simple, one-dimensional and objective.

A few years forward and this depiction has literally and figuratively become a picture of the past.

I can no longer paint my life through forms like Mayan hieroglyphics nor represent it using Classical or Renaissance art. Neither can I depict it using Post-Modern art since it still possesses a stark streak of meaning.

My life has become an outburst of more vivid colors. So if it did have a backdrop, it would be one of Jackson Pollock’s pieces.

Pollock was one of the early vanguards of Abstract Expressionism, a form of art that stemmed from a belief that the process of creating art is equally important as the final product itself. The art movement burgeoned during the Modern or Contemporary Period. Like all art forms during this era, the artists profusely challenged the Philosophical foundations of our “concrete world."

They wanted to express their unabashed emotions and complex thoughts rather than illustrate reality.

These artists were adamant in finding the truth behind all the ideologies and belief systems that were present. For some of them, the truth was laid in the unconscious mind and is only revealed in the process of spontaneously splashing, pouring, spreading and spraying paint all over a blank canvas. Jackson Pollock approached this process from different sides of the canvas, proposing that painting in patterns is of the past.

Like his creations, life will get messier when we get older. Relationships become more complicated, our insecurities and inhibitions surface more often, the beliefs we’ve stood by perniciously become potent sources of doubt and searching for more truth becomes a bigger mystery each day. It will be harder to express what we want, feel, need, think and hope for.

Now that the abstract part of life is becoming more tangible, I am relishing my younger years because I sometimes wish I still had that sense of surety about myself and the world I live in. Yet, I can only embrace the fact that life as an adult is becoming more of an Abstract Expressionist piece.

The process of finding truth in this constellation of colors and mysteries is as meaningful as I can expect the final piece to be.