The internalized image — When visibility and abstraction coincide

Abstraction — I used to avoid the mentioning of this concept — is an important notion in modern art. I try to merge abstraction with an etherial impressionistic vision…

Is this an image of abstraction given by nature, or is it me who distils the abstract quality out of the natural image? Or both? And what means ‘abstraction’? Is it a way of looking at the visible reality, or is it the expelling of all references to the material world?

Is ‘abstraction’ referring to a metaphysical range of ideas that dwells outside reality, or is it an essence that transcends the contradistinction of visibility and invisibility? In modern art once a watershed has been made between figurative and abstract art, although I never accepted this as such.

Is it de dynamic consistency of all musical qualities in an image such as the rhythmic repetition of horizontal, vertical and diagonal accents, lines or fields of color, and also the coherence of (primary, secondary and tertiary) color mixing and contrasts?

Anyway, on the moment I saw the golden-green and translucent membranes, hanging right above the blue water in between straight and curved branches, I knew that the image owns a high degree of abstraction.

Therefore this became one of my first paintings that moulds the fullness of nature on a more abstract manner — with less emphasis on concrete shapes, after a long period in which I wanted to express ‘emptiness’ via the fullness of visible shapes.

More than before I use in this painting line beside color, straight lines beside curved lines, warm beside cool colors, fine dashes beside broader ones. A more subtle balance arises between figuration and abstraction; the unity of opposites. One could also say that ‘light’ can be experienced as an optical as well as an inner quality. In painterly terms: the merging of the impressionistic and expressionistic vision into an internalised image.