“The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day… ‘We the people’ affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art” ~ Banksy
“People buy records by the millions, books by the thousands, movies by the millions… but people don’t buy our art” ~ Basquiat
The Cultural Landscape To Abstraction.
In my experience a great number of people are disinterested and or dislike/hate abstract art. Studies show that 24% of Americans flat out don’t like abstract art and feel cheated by it, we can speculate that an even greater percentage are simply disinterested in most abstract work.
These same people have all the tools to interpret the many moods of the sky and play in finding resemblances in the clouds, as if the only permission required to interpret meaning themselves was but the land beneath their feet.
In this series I have painted landscapes beneath abstract works in attempt to ground an audience that would regularly pass it by, creating the permission / consent from the viewer to receive and interpret the work with less resistance.
While looking at the work of Jasper Johns paintings of American flags. I thought about how abstract minimalism such as Barnett Newman’s “the voice of fire” receive a ton of criticism for its simplicity and price, a painting consisting of 3 equal stripes 2 blue with an orange one up the middle. I wondered how similar stripe designs could instil the same critics with feelings of comfort, pride, and loyalty making its stripes priceless by simply deciding it represents something that’s theirs.
Nicholas Edwards Art 