It’s Only Art?

There are many abstract painters on the contemporary art scene worldwide. If you would like to see their work you need only run a search to visit their websites. The abstract styles you can find are varied, and some are stylistically strong.

The nonobjective painters - a group within the abstract painters - are also well represented. Nonobjective painting is denoted by a complete lack of subject matter. In fact, in nonobjective painting, the abstraction is carried to an elemental degree so that only basic structures, forms, surface textural variation, color, transparency versus opacity, and usually with minimal patterning. Artists working in this way were called abstract expressionists for several decades, sometimes called action painters, particularly if they used active and spontaneous painting in the execution of the work.

These artists have some great canvases, and some interesting things to say as well. You can read about several of these journeyman artists at the articles, interviews and websites listed below.

Brad Bannister
Lynne Taetzsch
Shawn Mc Nulty
Lorraine Huber
Anne Stahl

These artists provide a cross section of abstract painting in nonobjective style. When your read the interviews and various statements by these artists you will find the common theme of formal concern rather than pushing an agenda. The reason for this is simple, their only agenda is the formal execution of art, without other mitigating messages. And that is the real strength of nonobjective painting - it doesn’t drag in subjective dogma of meaning.

Critics today may compare nonobjective painting to eye candy. They said that about Monet too. But in the words of Pere Tanguy, “My God, What an Eye.” Now Monet’s paintings, in retrospect, evoke the words “ethereal” or “spiritual”. And nonobjective painting is a perceptual statement that frees the viewer. No preaching, no hand-wringing.

It can be much stronger than eye candy. Nonobjective painting can be more visually powerful than any other style because of this freedom. Granted, that kind of freedom is frightening to many people, who need a prescribed meaning to cling to. But to see a powerful, purely designed, spontaneously produced nonobjective painting is the equivalent of seeing human creativity at its zenith - seeing the unknown, mastery of chaos, attaining a pure balance between the complex and the simple.

- Daniel Ferris