The idea of creating abstraction while at the same time anchoring that to something non-abstract in order to say to the viewer, “Hey! Abstraction!.” A rectangle may not remind a person of a house but maybe it would if there was a tree in the composition…or something like that. I feel I’m in over my head here.
It all reminds me of the use of complementary colors in paintings (like van Gogh’s works). Red is red but it really pops when it’s placed against green. Then you know what red means.

Although I can’t help but wonder if at the end of the day artists really want to control others’ thoughts. Heh. (I think I just heard June snort)

It does to the extent of my understanding.

The allusive can be so elusive. A problem when abstracting is a kind of blood/brain barrier – or perhaps better, Brain/brain barrier. What you have in mind in making the image is transmitted via a visual medium, in an effort to get an intended message across to my mind. I decipher the incoming message on my end as is my wont, and perhaps not as you want. A side channel or two is then often employed, like a one-way-pad to help me understand your message as intended. Your image then comes to me in an annotated fashion; a visual, textual, contextual mixtual. This effort may be for naught in the end as all of the ingredients in the enterprise are fraught with imprecision. This kind of discussion goes way back as a part of the Constructivist dialog.

All of that chowder aside, I would point out that a rectangle can be employed to denote a building. I know from personal experience, as I so denoted thousands of times while making maps in my short career as a photogrammetrist.The side channel instructed the map reader to so interpret the rectangles on the sheet.

I just hope that these concerns are not preventing you from making more lovely images.

Sure. This morning I imagined two reels with cord strung between. One reel has a handle and other not. The cord has a small dot on it representing a lifetime. This I see as our mortal lot, as we end up rolled into the reel with the handle.

Then I thought of the eternity scenario, where both reels have handles. Time here progresses both ways in a two dimensional fashion. Actually, a better construct would be two sets of reels with cords set across each other with a cinched point of intersection representing whatever module it is ours to eventually adopt. So will I manufacture it? Maybe, after I do all the stuff that I imagined yesterday morning.

Exactly.

Jay,

You ask about abstraction. I’m actually trying very hard to figure out what that is, and what it is for me. It surely has something to do with the /particular horse/horse in general/indeterminate horsy shape/ continuum, but I don’t think it’s that simple. What I’m more interested in is the allusive power of what the artist has created. You could say a rectangle is an abstract house, but if it doesn’t feel like or remind you of a house when you view the artwork, then it’s really just a specific rectangle.

It seems it should be possible to make something that is both a specific, say, horse, and also alludes strongly to horseness in general and, beyond that, even to things such as landscape, or humans. The ability to elicit those broader associations is what I’m trying to call abstraction, in my private vocabulary.

Of course, one way to do that is to show a smaller detail of the horse which, as you put it, “says horse,” but may also say other things (those other associations) as your mind is in the process of grasping it. For the image to work, those associations should add fittingly to the subject. (This relates to the question of visual indeterminacy discussed before, though Pepperwell’s paintings never resolve.)

I think a really, really good photo of a horse could be similarly evocative, but if it’s not great then you just immediately perceive “a horse” and are not tempted to go beyond that. I figure I’ll be good when I can make a photograph that is specific and abstract at the same time.

Did that make any sense?

Your last photograph makes me think that the horse will then raise his head as a centaur.

And photograph four so reminds me of one of the natural arches out in the Four Corners area.

I can see why you would choose to use the term “abstract” to describe some of these images. Another term like “evocative detail” might work too. I say that because the photograph doesn’t so much remove the subject to another level of generalization, but rather suggests the horse through a detail. One might counter that the detail says “horse” while a fuller image might say “a given horse”. But can the parameters of abstraction be taken from a “more horse -less horse” scale?