Paste: THINK FREELY (part 1). Hi everyone! Welcome back to Mixed Media Musings! I'm excited to seek out beauty and goodness in this new year. Bear with me for a long-ish post--this week is about the incredible importance of abstraction! Let’s look at a couple definitions of the word: 1. the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events. 2. freedom from representational qualities in art. Remember those elements and principles of design? Well, guess what? Those are your tools to express abstract ideas AND to depict figurative (AKA representational) subjects in art! I think one of the most crucial things an artist or designer can know is how to crossover from thinking figuratively--as well as concretely--to abstractly and back again. What does this mean? It means that you can look at a spindly wooden chair, and one minute you see it as a functional object used for sitting, and the next you see a holder for all the clothes on the floor, a foundational wall for a fort, or even a giraffe body if your little girl is going on a safari in the kitchen. The minute after that, you see a group of wooden lines interacting in space to make a subject that looks like a chair. Those stars in the sky? They aren’t stars; they’re just dots of light. That group of mountains is a series of overlapping purple triangles, and the cotton fields a repetition of lines. The shoebox in your closet is really just a group of rectangles that converge in space to make a box, and it can be a doll bed, dog body (right, @silver_spork?), or charging station as well as a container for shoes. See how I’m freeing these figurative things from their conventional roles as well as translating them into the elements and principles of design? It also means that you can have a idea or feeling and use these same elements and principles to give it a visual expression. Abstraction in art gives IMPACT to visual expression and VISUAL LIFE to ideas.