Aziz Basan ART BLOG

  This is the first painting in the series I started in 2019. I had just got fed up working on the representative images in a series of paintings I did on the wars that at the time were raging in the Middle East. Regardless of their representational basis these paintings already contained many elements of abstraction, so I decided to go all the way. Kandinsky's starting point was nature, so much so that he said any abstraction that was not rooted in nature was no better than the designs to be found on a carpet or necktie! Well, who am I to argue with Kandinsky? So I took the outline of a mountain I had used in my latest figurative work and jumped in, deciding to limit my palette initially to red, blue and yellow. But that didn't work out given the number of colour fields, so I decided to make one of these white and distribute different shades of it elsewhere in different shapes to see what I could contrast with my mountain outline. I completed nine abstract paintings with this ...

  In my last entry I noted that adding evocative images pushed my abstract work over into surrealism. I had this painting on my bedroom wall since then and finally decided that I did not like it. So I covered it, but with an almost black grey. Much better, if somewhat sinister: Yes, the photography is much better, too, with my new mirrorless Sony A6000, he smiled, although I still need to figure out better lighting... Be that as it may, the lines in the bottom area have ceased to look like tall dry grass in a roadside field, though you can still associate the lines with your knowledge of various grasses and whatever that brings up in you. And that is what I want to achieve, a feeling that guides you to what's familiar to you. You may have noticed also that the mountain outline is once again absent. However, the conundrum still remains: where to go from here? As I mull that over I have returned to my mountain motif in a different format. A while ago I made two sketches involvin...