Splash! Dash! Sweep! Grind your paintbrush onto canvas or watercolour paper and express those deep, inner feelings in bold colors and strange shapes. The public will pour in to guess why the artist did it this way or that way and they’ll have an informed opinion about the non-representational creation that they’re faced with.

Many of the 22 artists of your local Oliver Art Gallery are exhibiting their ABSTRACT paintings during the month of November.Just step in from the Main Street to see the power of these paintings. Early abstractions were designs on pottery, fabric, cave walls and Biblical writings using calligraphy. Western world artists started as realists studying human form in order to paint perfect bodies and accurate architecture. Shape, form, color and line were used to create close-to-reality depictions of worldly and heavenly things.

Early in the 1900’s Pablo Picasso set the art world astir by painting pure abstractions and exhibiting them after painting very realistically for his first 20 years. He used ‘cubism’ at first giving a distorted geometric look to everyday things and gradated to forms of his own invention. Matisse followed suit and became an abstract impressionist. He used ‘fauvism’ or unrealistic colors for the strange things he chose to paint like green horses or purple skies. In the U.S. Jackson Pollock achieved fame becoming an abstractionist. Out of this movement came ‘lyrical abstraction’ and ‘geometric abstraction’ which are totally abstract. ‘Figurative’ and ‘representational’  and ‘landscape’ abstraction are only partially abstract.

Come to the gallery and see if you can label the types of abstract work that we have presented for you.

Artist Sandra Albo