The other day, I spotted a postcard in the mail from a New York art gallery. I process mail for an upscale part of Naples, so that's not unusual. This particular postcard featured a detail portion of a painting by an artist named Larry Poons. If you click on his name, you can see a page with a number of his works on it. They are all extremely abstract.
To be honest, I'm not much for abstract art. I like art where the artist is trying to make me think or make me feel something, but in order to do that, it's generally necessary for the work to actually be clearly representative of something. If you can rotate the work by 90 degrees, either way, and not be able to say, "That's sideways," then in my opinion, it's not representative enough. It's just a color Rorschach test, and it's not for me.
There was another postcard a few days ago from a Naples gallery about an exhibition titled "Let's Go To the Beach," featuring paintings of the beach in various styles. One artist (I don't remember his name) had a couple of beautifully photorealistic paintings, one of waves rolling in from the Gulf, the other of water bubbling and pooling at the tide line, with sea shells on the sand. Most of the other works were impressionistic. As I told my partner on the machine, "Hey, if I want impressionistic, I'll just take my glasses off!"
