What makes you think? All too often we live our lives in a total reactive mode with little or no time for filtering the information that is penetrating our brains and deeply penetrating our souls. All media is designed to influence your thinking. Even art. That’s why I developed the phrase “Art Has An Agenda”. But what exactly is this agenda? If an artist creates a painting of a deer having a drink in a mountain stream with butterflies flittering about and a rainbow over a “happy little tree” in the background you might say the artist’s agenda is to make you feel whimsical, joyful, sunshine & lollypops. Nothing too deep, but certainly pleasant. Where your imagination goes and ends up will certainly not be too much of an evocative emotion.
“Maybe in our world there lives a happy little tree over there.” -Bob Rossi
Now enter religious art…can be interpreted as propaganda, but certainly for many, myself included, it is spiritually uplifting and motivational and can make you look into your own soul. One name comes to mind here El Grecco. Not much new here.
“Art is everywhere you look for it, hail the twinkling stars for they are God’s careless splatters” — El Greco
Abstract Impressionism art…there’s usually enough clues to help you create some sort of rational or irrational story. Meant to cause the mind to explore other universes within it’s own preconceived thinking. Think Jean Paul Riopelle, Arshile Gorky, Willem DeKooning, and Mark Tobey.
“Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes… Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas.” Arshile Gorky
Abstract Art…although loosely defined is about as deep as you can get. Unlike Surrealism, which still gives you clues, abstract art requires YOU the viewer to give back. At it’s peak abstract art can be defined as a true psychic shock medium. Meaning you can go as deep as you dare into your psyche. The process starts out somewhat benign, you float around the painting with random thoughts and ideas. But if you can let yourself go, you can be rapidly sucked in to another dimension of thinking and feeling. Almost a portal into another world. That world will be made up of a culmination of all of your life’s experiences. The catalyst of this art may for many be shock. Once you drop into the inter-chasms of your mind and lose reality and clarification of thought you may truly see for the first time. This is light years away from the deer at the stream.
“Let go…and explore for yourself. Run toward, not away from abstract art. Be rewarded, be revealed, be vulnerable, which can only lead to inner wisdom and growth.” ~ RJ~
Thoughts Within - Rod Jones Artist -Oil on Canvas 36w x 48h
The Thoughts Within painting was created in three painting sessions. It appears that there may be dripping, but those that are familiar with my work understand that I do not like art where the paint is allowed to run. The marks that appear like running paint were created by using an amber medium and then painted again and rubbed out, leaving the marks that appear like running paint.
