April 7, 2016

I struggled with the concept of abstract art for many years, unable to identify that elusive quality that makes a non-objective piece a good one. I could appreciate other forms of abstraction, those that have some object of focus to which I can relate. But non-objective abstractions had always seemed empty to me, devoid of quality and spirit.

A few weeks ago, I met an interesting artist, Lyz Wendland, a painter-turned-mixed-media-artist. Her work involves a level of abstraction I had never before considered: taking an element of reality and reducing it to simple elements, then building up from that into a whole piece.

Lyz’s work exemplifies this concept.

She moved to the suburbs by necessity and hated every block, every row of identical houses. To ease her mind, Lyz forced herself to find something artistic in the area to inspire her, saying, If I make it into art, maybe I’ll like it more. Whether she likes the suburbs now is irrelevant; the beauty is that that dedicated thought produced an entire line of work that has come to inspire me.

On a walk around her neighborhood, she noticed a pond covered in circular patterns of scum. Most would avoid these aesthetics. Lyz saw in the pond scum a simple beauty, so she pulled its colors into her next line of work. Later on that same walk, she met a pothole in the road. The shape intrigued her, becoming the foundational shape explored in her pond-scum-inspired works.

If I had to decide on one thing about Lyz Wendland’s work that gives me the most inspiration or insight, it would be the process behind it, the process of allowing yourself to be intrigued by some small part of the world, breaking it into simple concepts and then using those blocks to build a greater piece—an abstraction that has some small shred of logic behind it.

An abstraction with soul.

Perhaps the piece will not be understood. Perhaps the piece will not be sold.

It will be noticed.

It will intrigue.

It will inspire.