Without any formal art education, I tend to come on new artists by chance or recommendation or perhaps from the media. Accordingly my knowledge of art and artists is patchy and variable. As an example I recently watched a documentary on TV about the artist Joan Mitchell, who was at the time unknown to me. Stimulated by that I have been looking, on the net only alas, at some of the work of her contemporaries. Like most people with a passing interest in the subject I knew of Pollock and Rothko, but beyond that people like Mitchell and de Kooning had passed me by.
One of the things that fascinates me about abstract art is the way in which a seemingly arbitrary arrangement of blocks of color on a flat surface can still evoke a sense of 3D space. As an example, looking through a book about de Kooning I came on two pictures - 'Palisade' from 1957 and 'September Morn' from 1958, both of which immediately made me think of the work of the Victorian artist John Martin, whose work I saw recently at the Tate Gallery in London. These two had strong resonances with Martin's vast, storm swept landscapes, usually with a tiny human figure somewhere in the scene.
Similarly, 'Montauk Highway' conjures up a strong sense of movement through space which was apparent without knowing the title.
