This post marks the 'QUARTER-CENTURY' of blog since its inception last August! Thank you to all of you for your support. Welcome especially, to a few new members/followers.
Today's post will be a brief one, with a three-pronged purpose:
Firstly, to mark the occasion.
Secondly (hence the dual title) to introduce you to my newest oil painting.
Thirdly, to reiterate and perhaps elaborate a little on the aim of this blog.
Marking the occasion.
I've averaged 3.5 posts per month; sometimes I'll post two in a week, or even more, sometimes the frequency slows a little. Productivity depends on my mood, my preoccupations, my creativity – all the usual factors.
The new painting.
Entitled THERE'S NO TURNING BACK, this picture seems to embody a curious blend of the calm and the vertiginous, even the obsessive. Currently in my life I am engaged in a few matters which frighten me to a degree, but I am always of the belief that such matters must be confronted and that, indeed, there is no turning back. I feel very vulnerable at present, though, and this may manifest in my paintings.
THERE'S NO TURNING BACK - Haydn Dickenson (2023). Oil on Canvas, 76 x 102 cm unframed.
We can never truly turn back, for steps retraced and then retrodden are always made in the light of the previous ones; they are not fresh. In the same way, a statement can never be made again in the same way – it always involves different words, or a subtly different inflection in the voice. “Screw your courage to the sticking place, and we'll not fail” (William Shakespeare).
The aims of artfullyabstractedblog.com
These are:
To offer an insight into my work, my influences, and my cultural milieu.
To share with my readers some of my views on abstract art and art in general and, hopefully, to provoke some debate.
To dispel, I hope, a little of the stigma surrounding abstract art. I feel abstraction is still distrusted by some, derided by others, and feared by plenty. So often, I encounter the slightly flustered, nervous statement “Oh, I don't understand abstract art” or even “I don't understand art”.
You don't have to understand art to love it or, indeed, to hate it; either standpoint is valid! A certain contextual appreciation can be illuminating though, and I have received many heart-warming comments about, for instance, my articles about the origins of abstraction, and archetypal symbols in abstract art. I am so grateful that you, my readers, find them interesting and stimulating.
That will do for today. Please keep sharing my blog, and let's get it to the Half-Century for which my agent is pressing me, by the month of June. I think we can make that!
Copyright Haydn Dickenson 2023
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