Abstractions: How Autumn impresses me

I love colours! Don’t get me wrong.. although I enjoy creating black and white imagery, black and white photography, if you will, I really enjoy the blessings colour impressions in pictures can bring me, especially revealed in exquisite light.

I had a problem while out in the field doing some photo work. I accidentally moved the camera while I was shooting an intimate landscape that really impressed me, a landscape of beautiful colour changes during autumn, and the picture came out rather shaky, so to say. I thought that I would return home with something to work on, but the only thing that mattered really was the composition and the lighting conditions in the frame that I composed.

It was a bright, sunny day with a clear blue sky, one that I really wanted to avoid in photography. It seems that it’s like a “Nemesis” for me and it really challenges me greatly. It pushes me far beyond my creative limits and it makes me handle the most difficult of the situations that I can encounter out there. It makes me shoot in the conditions that I don’t really like, although I enjoy a bright, sunny day with a clear blue sky above and the feeling that it gives me, a feeling of joy.

Abstract photography, just like most abstract art works actually, is very difficult to understand and to create. For some even impossible to understand. Many people, who are traditionalists, hate abstract art works because they don’t find any valuable significance whatsoever in them. In fact they can’t find any value in them.

But the actual significance of a successful abstract art work is to cross the boundaries of what is comfortable to comprehend and what is not. Abstract art is challenging the viewers’ imagination in any possible way.

What is abstract, actually? Some people may answer “something that is not real”? But what is real, then? This is the biggest and the most challenging question because many people answer saying what is not real instead of answering the beforehand question.

I am not interested in what is not real and I would like many of you to ask yourselves this question. I would like people to cross the border of the known into the unknown. Fear is what holds us back.

Abstract, I found, is something that is not from the realm of the concretely, definite, actual, some people say “real”, meaning what we can actually name and have a use for. But get this! Before the arrival of the Spaniard conquistadors in South and Central America, the natives had no idea how a galleon, their ship looked like. There was only one who knew: the medicine man or the witch doctor of the tribe. He had a notion of how this looks like. But the funny thing is when the ships arrived he was the only one who actually saw them, given the fact that many from the tribe were looking with him in the distance from the shore at the ships approaching. The only one who saw them, like I said, was the witch doctor. The others were looking too but somehow they could not see anything unusual, so to speak. They didn’t recognize the ships. So, they were abstract to them. :) Actually, they didn’t recognize them as being unusual, out of the ordinary, so they heeded no warning as to being dangerous or something. This is why the so-called traditionalists despise abstract art because they don’t see any value in it. They can’t recognize anything. But what if I show you some nebulae photographed in the outer space with a wide-angle lens, would you say that they are nebulae? Or would you say that they’re just some specs of colours and that is it.

People need anchors in order to understand or to consider an art work really valuable and this is their frontier. People need some landmarks in order to name things approapriately.

Of course, I don’t ignore the false abstract art in which actually nothing is communicated, in which there’s no message. I take them in consideration as well. I classify them as unsuccessful or a waste of time and shouldn’t be considered art works at all.

The only thing important here is the reflections upon the notions of abstract and real, or definite, the meditations we should conduct upon them.

Autumn is a very interesting season. Lots of colours in it and lots of ways to reveal them to the world. Mother Nature shows us again her artistic abilities. But I say it is time to cross the boundaries backwards and see autumn’s potentials before the beginning of the notion called autumn. I don’t really attach this notion anymore to the actual phenomena instead I am awed by the colour shows Nature gives me and I like to take out every aspect that can make it loud and clear and specific. I’d like to remain only to the first impressions.

Autumn doesn’t exist actually. It is just a name we gave to a few phenomena happening out there. What exists are the potentials, the capabilities. If we open our eyes truly we’ll see that they are only imaginable possibilities what we perceive. :)