“Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind.”

— Arshile Gorky

I LOVE abstract art! It attracts me and pulls me like no other form of artistic expression.

Last week the assignment was to take a landscape image and abstract it.

I started with a simple sketch, drawing the long stretched-out triangles of the rows and filling them in with dark pencil strokes. I was feeling silly so I invited some personalities in by adding eyes to the mountains in the background.

I had a brand new pack of watercolor pencils I couldn’t wait to try, so I cracked them open and began playing.

I experimented with different amounts of water and brushstrokes, starting with more expected landscape colors and then moving on.

Who says a landscape can’t be red and yellow?

Instead of piecing individual mountains as I first planned, I found this black and white strip of triangle shapes, which was a more pleasing symmetrical shape across the top of the image. As I was sewing the mountains to the red and yellow rows, I began singing the Beatles’ song, “Strawberry Fields Forever.”