On Abstraction

[holland]

To "abstract" something is to make it different from reality. As reality is infinitely complicated, the artist is constantly abstracting everything they are doing or referencing, no matter how "realistic" their art ends up being. We don't make portraits by carefully rearranging atoms to be a perfect match for those of the sitter, after all.

For that reason, it's important to not conflate abstraction with "abstract art." Abstract art is just one extreme expression of these underlying ideas. The ideas themselves are universal to all styles and artforms.

Our goal with abstraction as artists is generally to simplify an image, process, or concept to the point that it fits in the 6x6x6 Rule.

Let's try following a path down the coloring tree of a painter for a simple example. We can simplify color itself into hue, value, and saturation, which form three branches on our initial tree. We might also have concepts like light physics, pigments, and color palettes there.

If we follow the value branch (referring to the darkness of our colors), we then find concepts like our value range, scale, edges, groups, and key. And their children are the specific types we have available to use in our design palettes for these topics.

By combining these different branches, we achieve a more complex outcome. Like even if we have only 3 values in our scale, that doesn't mean our final image will have only three values, because we will also be applying "edges" (types of transitions or blending) to them. These edges allow us to communicate more complex forms and lighting effects that are expressed between those values, such as bevels, curves, reflections, and gradients.

We can also apply these 3 values over several local values, or at multiple levels of depth with different value ranges. So that even if you're conceptually only thinking of a "3 value scale" and are thus only holding the cognitive load associated with 3 values, you end up actually using dozens of different values by the end of the work.

Ambitious students tend to get very frustrated when learning abstractions. "Why should I arbitrarily limit myself? That's lazy. I'm better than that, and I'll use as much complexity as I want." This is a natural byproduct of inexperience. By having never gone through "the whole process" before, they don't realize that 1) they can achieve the level of complexity they want by the end even when using a simplified approach, and 2) having a high level of complexity in your initial foundation makes the later steps that compound on it exponentially more difficult. One extra option at step one can become hundreds of extra options or tasks by steps three or four.

So while a student who has a strong sense of value may be able to handle a 24-value scale in a rough underpainting, trying to apply that same scale to a color palette or finely rendering all the edges involved is likely to cognitively and emotionally overwhelm them, leading to avoidance of later steps of the process.

This issue can be minimized by allowing students to go through the full process as early as possible. They need hands-on experience to understand why we abstract things the way we do and how that helps them personally. Just modeling it isn't enough for onlooking perfectionists.