Piet Mondrian started as a landscape artist and arrived at abstraction. Maybe he actually made a journey into the essence of landscape or the essence of things we see as chairs and trees. When seeing fabrics, blood, skin and cells under the microscope they appear to be patterns of shapes and pretty close to Mondrian’s artwork.
How does this journey go in photography? Maybe a good example is the work of Andreas Gursky, yet also in his work the grass along the Rhein is still recognizable as grass and houses as houses. A camera can produce abstract images, yet we tend to photograph things in their normal being and not as essential abstract patterns of light and matter. Why is this? I don’t know. Maybe Photoshop will be more likely the tool to create “Mondrians” with our photographs, extracting “abstracts” from them, transforming it into artwork. Photoshop is just great for that, our electronic brush.
For those who like Mondrian, there is a nice book “Coppernickel goes Mondrian”. Check it out.
Ute Sonnenberg for www.rohoyachui.com
