Thoughts on Modern Art

What makes modern art so beautiful? At first glance, some people would say there isn’t anything that special about it. Others wouldn’t even call it art! A few lines here and some abstract shapes there. Add a little color, or take it away, and you’ve got a twenty-million-dollar masterpiece that haters would say isn’t worth dime. But I’m not like most people. At least not in my artistic preferences. My ongoing love affair with modern art has influenced my own work because I’ve always understood the beauty and value of modern art. The challenge of our collective notions of subjective experience is maybe why I’ve never been able to resist a modern art exhibit ever since I first began attending museums.

No matter what museum I’d visit, I could never help but be drawn to the modern art exhibits. Rushing past the neo-classical or renaissance collections, I’d always quickly make my way to a bench or sofa to sit in a room full of modern classics. Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly, and Mark Rothko... it was always the abstract pieces that moved me most. The focus on color and feeling. It made me feel something. So when I decided to start painting again earlier this year, I knew I needed to create works of art with a similar modern flair. Because I wanted to move others in the same way I had been moved by the work I had loved all my life.

What I didn’t expect was that through this process of creation I would find a new way to love my favorite artists and their creations. During the first trial-and-error phase of developing my mop painting technique, I realized that the creation of my modern art had become a dance. Creating a painting is like a complicated jazz composition while simultaneously following the rules of a strictly choreographed ballet. The strokes and splats of my mop brush are unexpected and guided by my emotions, yet they’re also aligned with the principles I mastered through my conceptual photography on what the eye finds aesthetically pleasing. My process is a dance, and I want my audience to dance with me as they view what I create. I want you to dance with me. I hope the paintings below will help you understand my dance, and see the beauty I see when viewing modern artwork. 

Love, 

Carolyn 

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