When thinking about the topic of abstracting there are many different examples that pop into one’s head right away. As discussed in our readings abstracting is more than just the surface level comparisons, but more of a deeper connection going past the obvious and into that of the underlying connected ideas.
The reading starts off by by giving examples of the connecting similarities of harmonics with music and atoms, and in thinking about the combination of science and the arts got me thinking about my field and its deeper connections with other fields of study. After some researching and reflection I started thinking about Pop Arts bold colors and repeating patterns/images and their deeper meaning, it’s not just the topic, but the ease of detailed reproduction, creating an image exactly like another. I talked about Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup prints, but these are one of many other stylized prints he did that also focus on repeating images.
Warhol did a lot of his art using the art method Screen Printing, a process in which a person uses a silk screen with a stencil created in it using a light sensitive chemical. This light sensitive chemical is called Photo emulsion and can be very fickle to work with. This got me thinking about my experience with screen-printing, one of my personal favorites in art mediums, and the large amount of science that went into it. As a teacher and an artist I feel as if I have a raised awareness of the breakdown of processes gone through to create a piece of art, and contrary to some peoples beliefs artists need a basic understanding of how to work with many different materials, their uses by themselves, their uses once combined with another, and most importantly what combinations yield workable materials and unusable junk.
I am in no way a scientist, but I can tell you what chemicals go into Photo emulsion, specific measurements, and what happens when you get the right mixture or the wrong mixture. So the abstraction of connecting science, AKA chemical compositions and mixtures, with art, the creation of a detailed stencil made available only through this method, start to become clear. The now awareness of this connection and understanding of the abstraction now get me thinking about the other underlying abstractions art and how these help discovery and understanding. Understanding the process gone through to create a screen for printing, not only the chemical mixing process but the added on process of “burning” an image into the screen using a high wattage light and a transparency, but also the process of learning about how the photo emulsion works and the amount of testing of the chemical when I first started working with it. Finding out how long to expose the screen for the perfect image, figuring out that if I left it on to long the image would not wash out and too little time yielded a screen where all of the emulation washed off, all of this experimenting is something a scientist would do with a hypothesis.
The impact of this connection, using abstraction, opens up a world of thinking about the application, combination, and testing of mediums used in art and its connection to the scientific method of hypothesizing and how together they challenge the idea of the artist being a slave to their visions and more into the role of inventor finding the perfect solution.
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Visual representation of Abstracting Screen Printing
1.) Breakdown of Screen into basic elements
2.) Drawing of chemical composition of Photo Emulsion
gerehead's MAET year 1 