MobiColour RESULT: MC #147 Theme: Minimalism - Nov 19-25, 2018

On canvas
IMG_6767.JPG
 
rizole said:
It's simplicity of form and the reduction of shapes to basic geometrical, esp squares and rectangles, that minimalism tends towards if I've read it right. Also a flattening of the palette. Elegance, simplicity and a removal of the subtextural. One quote I liked was:
‘What you see is what you see’.
It's almost opposite to abstractionism in that's it's quite concrete.
Not so much Ceci n'est pas une pipe as Une pipe.
Click to expand...
I’m just chatting here, not making any declarative statements...
Personally, I would leave out the part about squares and rectangles. Simplicity of form, the simplest of shapes, lines, often a minimal colour palette. Even an ordinary square is a higher level of complexity than a simple curved line. I sort of feel a square is rather mechanical compared to forms in nature. Or a flower is highly complex compared to a bent blade of grass. But at a different scale, a flower is a simple blob against an open field.
One thing I read was that some artists ventured into minimalism as a protest against abstractionism. Some of them didn’t even like minimalism but just did it to make a point, hoping the abstractionists would go away and things would get back to normal.
Sometimes I wonder what is the absolute minimum a picture can have and still be intriguing.
 
FundyBrian said:
I’m just chatting here, not making any declarative statements...
Personally, I would leave out the part about squares and rectangles. Simplicity of form, the simplest of shapes, lines, often a minimal colour palette. Even an ordinary square is a higher level of complexity than a simple curved line. I sort of feel a square is rather mechanical compared to forms in nature. Or a flower is highly complex compared to a bent blade of grass. But at a different scale, a flower is a simple blob against an open field.
One thing I read was that some artists ventured into minimalism as a protest against abstractionism. Some of them didn’t even like minimalism but just did it to make a point, hoping the abstractionists would go away and things would get back to normal.
Sometimes I wonder what is the absolute minimum a picture can have and still be intriguing.
Click to expand...
The thing I find curious in this story about the abstractionists and the minimalists is that the central skill we need in order to make a composition is the ability to abstract, or to see the simple lines and shapes, the forms, among the complexity of an average scene. In minimalism we don’t even need to abstract to see the simple forms because that’s all there is in the picture. You could say it is pre-abstracted to the basic forms. So there is no need see through any complexity to discover the simplicity within because the complexity has already been stripped away.
Perhaps in the end that is the defining factor in deciding if an image is truly minimalist. If you have to see through a layer of complexity, in other words abstract, to see the basic forms then the image could be stripped down one more layer. You eventually reach a point where the image cannot be simplified further without ceasing to exist.
 
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