Abstract paintings and geometry

When visiting the day of the open studio "auf AEG" in Nuremberg I came across Gerhard Kij's studio with lots of very interesting abstracts like the following one:



It's rich with many details that make you want to wander through the image taking it all in, but it is not too wild regarding colors and it has an inherent geometric structure that makes you think of something derived from real-world architecture. The interesting thing was that next to this image hung a painting that was clearly "based" on some realistic tunnel or similar building. So somehow this image spoke to me as a photographer as it had some likeness to scenes I'd love to shoot.

Could or would I make a photo like Gerhad Kij's image? Certainly not! But it is interesting to see abstract paintings borrowing from real-world geometry. Which in turn means that us photographers should not let us keep from achieving abstraction only because our forms mostly come from well-known real-world subjects.

Visit the artist's website at www.gerhard-kij.de

An Artist's Palette

Fascinating how artists' palettes look like! I had the opportunity to have a look into some studios last weekend, when "auf AEG" opened the door. Palettes are the abstracts of any (painting) artist's images - because they only contain the colors of their images! And sometimes not even that: because the process of creating the color of an image is often done on the canvas and not on the palette.
Anyway I was intrigued by the palette of Anna Bittersohl and gave it a try: one of the colors alone and one showing them in the context of painting with brushes in the foreground. Still pretty abstract.





If you're interested in what Anna Bittersohl produced with those colors visit her website www.bittersohl.net and go to her work from 2012.

Inspiration from Paintings

As I had announced in my "Next up"-post here are some thoughts on the inspiration that paintings can supply.

This is a monotype by my wife titled "Girl at the Window". And we're lucky with that as my wife seldom gives her images any title at all! She claims that titles influence the perception of an image by the beholder - and she doesn't like that. Well, in this case you can easily see half of a female face "behind" a window dotted with rain, or don't you?

How does this inspire me? A rain-streaked window can indeed be a very strong filter to "abstractify" an otherwise boring subject and reduce it to its main colors and forms. I'll show you an example of that shortly...

Next up

Just as a note to myself (and as an anchor to anyone wanting to suggests topics) here are some ideas for upcoming posts and other work:
- RotoMerge and Photomerge: On the (non-)use of tools
- Paintings: Adding my wife as another source of inspiration (Done, see here)
- Abstract: What is "abstract" all about (Done, see here)
- Keywords: Make a page to easily access posts by keywords/tags/labels (Done, see on the right under "Pages")

Photographs and Paintings

Just to kick off things a bit further I remembered an interesting thread at the Nikongear forum about Photographs and Paintings.
My thoughts on this were:
"Let's put photo-realistic paintings aside for a while.
I think paintings show ways of abstraction from / transformation of a photographic reproduction that are interesting to photographers. Abstraction can make the image/viewer focus more on the "grand scheme" like the colors, the light, the main geometric form etc. This is at least for me a source of inspiration.
Unfortunately for us photographers we only have limit means to achieve abstraction unless we use post-processing: dof/oof, motion blur, shake.
...
Ah well, come to think of it: there is also the use of filters or other "optically active"/reflective/refractive subjects in a scene like water/waves, glass, metal, smoke/fog, hot air, flare."

And here's another image that shows how you can "abstractify" a tree using its reflection on water:

As always you can click through the image in this post to its flickr-page where there is more information about it and also larger versions.