As a human my experience is embodied. I am not a disembodied reason or a brain in a vat. For a more in depth discussion see Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh. In other words, Descartes’ idea that “I think, therefore I am” is totally wrong. The language of representation is built on linear perspective, an “abstraction” that is not true to our embodied experience. Thus most representational work feels dead. The exceptions are when the artists breaks the rules…but that’s a whole other discussion (David Hockney talks at length about these issues in a number of his books). Anyway, the language of abstract painting is the language of shapes and forms, of color, of overlapping plains, on a flat surface. When we as abstract artists speak in this language, we create paintings that have more life, are more real. They become living moving objects, because the surface of the canvas has been activated. Shapes, forms, colors, gestures, marks, etc. become carriers for our thoughts and feelings, both conscious and subconscious. Creating an abstract piece of work can be described as the process of embodiment of the artist’s thoughts, feelings, desires, etc. in paint.

So a lot of readers have been asking me about the origin of name the blind swimmer. The first part of the answer is pretty straight forward – I used to be a competitive swimmer. Then, I was reading The Writings of Robert Motherwell while I was trying to come up with a name for the blog and came across an awesome little essay from 1949 entitled “Abstract art and the Real,” where he used the phrase, and I had an aha moment.

I’ll reproduce the essay here:

Abstract Art and The Real (1949)
Excerpted from The Writings of Robert Motherwell p. 85.

Indeed, abstract art never would have been invented, except as the result of the moste obstinate and sensitive effort to go with art’s grain. Abstract art is not something, as are certain modes of Surrealism – though not all – that a “literary” or “philosophical” mind would have imagined a priori. In this sense, abstract art is not invented or arbitrary at all, but found, found in the sensitive, passionate, and profoundly accurate – in terms of feeling – adjustments that constitute the immediate act of painting which is an effort, often clumsy and sometimes desperate, like a blind swimmer, to cover the abyss , the void that the world sometimes presents, with our love, with our sensualty and passion, our sense of commitment to a mode of expression that becomes ideal, whin it does, only because it is so deeply rooted in the real. It is this sense of abstract art’s reality that Mondrian must have had in mind when he remarked on his own art, “Squares? I see no squares in my pictures,” and led him, at the end of his life, to speak of his art as a ‘new realism.’