Quarantine Art - Experiment in Abstraction

Firsts (2020)

I have long been fascinated with the transition undertaken by both Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinski from figural to abstract painting. Every once in a while, I feel the pull in my own collage work to move from the figural, albeit surreal, juxtapositions to less representational images.

Inspired by several sleepless nights, I once created a triptych of swirling and amorphous black pieces of paper to capture the feeling of my mind speeding up after turning off the light.

I have found a lot of bold, blank colours in the magazines I have been cutting up for my collage. A pure abstraction of such hues was the first inspiration. However, I felt it would be quite flat. An article's title page presented an appealing script of the word "firsts". When isolated from type-set and syntax, the letters themselves become their own shapes. Language is a system of agreed-upon symbols. However, the scripts of written language are not universal symbols. The inherent contradictions appeal to me. In my travels, I have meandered through venues where foreign scripts I cannot read remind me that illiteracy is a relative concept.