I didn’t always paint abstract stuff. Years ago I was wedded to form and for a while that endeavour served me well.
I practiced the craft of ‘realistic’ drawing and during my two years at the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology spent most of my waking hours (outside of fulfilling the tasks of the graphic design curriculum) in this pursuit – enchanted by the draughtsmanship of artists who could depict form (particularly the human form) with precision, brevity and ease.
Concurrently there were other artists of interest (Egon Schiele, Amedeo Modigliani and Oskar Kokoshka) and their more stylised iterations around the same theme of responsiveness to ‘realistic’ form began to influence my own work (becoming apparent after finishing Polytech).
Later, artists like Paul Klee (with his playful visual language) piqued my interest (and retrospectively seemed to fulfil a transitional phase) until eventually discovering the later abstract paintings of Mark Rothko.
I didn’t get to abstraction by trying to do abstraction (as I was naturally wedded to the visual expression of ‘realistic’ form).
In the end (thus far) I got to abstraction by responsiveness to ‘The Mystery’ – a term Adi Da used and encapsulated by paraphrasing what he wrote in a book for children (called “What to Remember to Be Happy”):
“It’s a great a wonderful mystery how everything is – but nobody knows what it really is or how it came to be.”
So, abstraction (for now) helps me get closer to expressing ‘The Mystery’ than any other form of visual expression I’ve yet encountered.