What Abstract Painting Teaches Us
“What is that?” This is a question that young artists get ALL the time and mostly from their parents about their artwork. And we, as dutiful and committed art educators, instruct parents instead to ask, “How did you make that?”
Our society has always been preoccupied with labeling things: people, objects, artwork. We want to know the title so we can figure out what it is. We are less interested or maybe less inclined to wonder and investigate about how something was made or why it was made. And here’s where abstract art comes into play. When we create work that is only shapes, lines, or color, we ask our audience and our artists to thoughtfully consider the basic elements of art-making. At Scribble, teaching abstract art at ALL ages is ironically foundational to teaching our students and viewers what art is.
When people ask, “What is that?”, an abstract artist from Scribble will proudly declare “It is art.”
What does abstract painting teach us?
Deep experimentation:
When your learning objective is to make as many different lines, shapes or colors as you can (each as separate lessons!), without the pressure of this exploration living within a landscape, portrait or still life, artists are able to more deeply experiment and discover the possibilities of each foundational element of art.
The most basic and essential parts of a whole:
Would you ask your students to write a sentence without knowing how to write words? Or write a word without knowing how to write letters? Lines, shapes and color are the foundational building blocks of making a piece of artwork and it’s important that we give time and space for our young artists (or even older artists with less art experience) to fully understand how to work with each of them before combining these parts in the service of making a picture of something.
Our choices are what make us unique, not our subject matter:
If we all make abstract paintings with the prompt of making new colors with a limited palette, our work will yield a wide array of diverse paintings. And what better way to demonstrate to artists that their choices of color or composition make them who they are. Their decisions of how they’ve chosen to create a piece of artwork and not what they’ve decided to make, are what make them unique artists.
Enjoy these amazing complex abstract pieces from all ages of artists below!
