The modest abstractures below were made whilst walking along the coastal rocks west of Dep's Beach with Maya on a late afternoon poodlewalk.They are part of a series (the blog posts are now a notebook) as the photos do not typically reward attention as particulars, but rather as members of a group or a series of photographic abstractions.
I am struggling to find material on this form of abstraction understood as imagery that has been ‘abstracted’ from nature. In the visual arts abstraction is understood in modernist terms--which presupposed the specificity of the arts ( painting, sculpture etc) and their purity. Abstraction in modernism is the divergence from representation, figuration and narrative. Whilst abstraction in painting stood for a purely autonomous, autotelic art and a universally legible language, photographic abstraction is usually seen as decoration -- a splash of colour and cheap profundity for the boardroom or bedroom.
That much is well known. The difficulty I'm encountering is going beyond this 20th century art history to rethink photographic abstraction in the 21st century. The puzzle is: what is abstraction’s contemporary artistic meaning and significance beyond rejecting realism and the parochialism of the figure/ground distinction or returning to or rescuing abstraction from its obsolesence, as the familiar, wholesome, and spiritually nourishing in reaction to the Global Financial Crisis.