Share

Art Movements

5 Reasons To Love Abstract Art

Paul Bennett is an contemporary Fine Artist specialising in exceptional semi-abstract seascape/landscape paintings and also unique portraiture. The two themes are very different in mood and style, but both are made from using a mix of traditional techniques and more unconventional painting methods. Both rely on drawing from memory to create finished work that is abstracted and more expressional than representational.

By Rise Art

Paul Bennett

 

REASON 1: The process of abstraction originally appealed to me as it seemed less restrictive than other styles of painting. However, I found that I needed to apply some of my own rules to make it work for me. One of the rules was to somehow ground the work in the idea of a place but to not have specifics and to let the work represent the world around us, but have no location or place. Achieving a balance between the imagined and the real is one reason why I love abstraction.

 

View Point - Paul Bennett

View Point
Paul Bennett

REASON 2: The second is that I would never like my work to be purely representational. I admire those that work towards representing our world in more literal terms, but for me it is just appreciation for a talent and the skill in communicating our surroundings.

 

Time Waits - Paul Bennett

Time Waits
Paul Bennett

REASON 3: I prefer to let the viewer interpret my paintings in their own way and using abstraction allows this to happen. It is great to hear what people see in it. I think it’s one of the major reasons why I paint the way I do.

 

Run Away - Paul Bennett

Run Away
Paul Bennett

REASON 4: I've never been a fan of inspiration and its place in reaching a finished painting. I believe that the finished painting will emerge from the process, rather than sitting around wait for the lightning bolt to strike. I think Chuck Close sums it up quite well: "The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If youʼre sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find thatʼs almost never the case". 
Working in abstraction allows me to create within a process. I am not entirely without inspiration, and travelling the coast lines of the U.K. and exploring some of its more remote places brings me to the fifth reason I love abstraction.

 

WInter's Tide - Paul Bennett

Winter's Tide
Paul Bennett

REASON 5: The opportunity to go out and explore these remote places and to take in as much as I can.

 

View PAUL'S full page on Rise Art HERE

Related Artworks

Related Guides

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read This Next

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regional Settings

English
US (USD)
United States
Metric (cm, kg)