VIEWING ART NOT AS IMITATION OF REALITY
 
What I have tried to do here was to deal with limited means, on the issue of Art as a representation of reality and Art as a bolder expression derived from the concept of what Culture is in the multicultural world we live in.

I believe that the main issue is the fact that people tend to consider art as a representation of reality, very much entrenched in inherited notions that have not, for some reason, been updated true The History of Art, therefore the earlier mentioned concept of Art as being closer to reality brought the notion that an artist is basically someone who imitates reality, so the closer it is to it, the better the artist.

However, it is not perceivable the border between art and craftsmanship which may not be creative, but rather reproductive and repetitive, something that has changed since industrialization took place.

If we take a look on some notions that are in the books, we may start by asking What is Art ?

Circumstantial notions:
Art has not always been what we think it is today. An object regarded as Art today may not have been perceived as such when it was first made, nor was the person who made it necessarily regarded as an artist. Both the notion of "art" and the idea of the "artist" are relatively modern terms.

Many of the objects we identify as art today -- Greek painted pottery, medieval manuscript illuminations, and so on -- were made in times and places when people had no concept of "art" as we understand the term. These objects may have been appreciated in various ways and often admired, but not as "art" in the current sense.

Art lacks a satisfactory definition. It is easier to describe it as the way something is done -- "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others" rather than what it is.

But how did Art become distinguished from the decorative arts and crafts? How and why is an artist different from a craftsperson?

In the Ancient World and Middle Ages the word we would translate as 'art' today was applied to any activity governed by rules, reason why we do call activities such as sword fighting or empty handed fighting as Martial Arts. Painting and sculpture were included among a number of human activities, such as shoemaking and weaving, which today we would call crafts.

The Greeks called Art as Tekhne and the Romans said Ars in Latin, which were applied to all kind of human activity.

The Greeks applied rules as a means of bringing order (we may call it systematization today) to the perceived chaos of nature and the world around them. They consciously sought order, clarity, balance, and harmony in their works.
Rules provided a measure of control, and through control, a form of comprehension. To maintain order it is necessary to apply rules, and the tradition that supports them. This is the nature of the "classical" which is perforce traditional and conservative.

In this situation, painters and sculptors differed merely in their competence or capability in applying the rules of their trade. They were admired for how well they mastered the rules, for their technique and skills.

On the other end, we are faced with the contemporary concept that art is a very arguable and non-regulamented set of non existing rules, that are bringing chaos to the root of Aristotelian concept of Tekhne.

Not wanting to play with words, we see that the concept has reversed, as expected, an the late 19 the century and during the entire 20 the century Modern Art gave way to Contemporary Art.
What has finished, however, is not artistic production, but a certain way of talking about art. Artists, whoever they are, continue to produce, but we, non-artists, are no longer able to say whether it is art or not.

But at the same time, we are no longer comfortable with dismissing it as art because it fails to fit what we think art should be (whatever that is).

We struggle with this because we have been taught that art is important and we're unwilling to face up to the recently revealed insight that art in fact has no "essence", very much close to Eastern Philosophies that use the concept of non-being.

When all is said and done, "art" remains significant to human beings and the idea that now anything can be art, and that no form of art is truer than any other, strikes us as unacceptable.

Creativity is what approaches man to the divinity, where he strives to emulate the act of creation in the many different ways at his reach. It is said that what one does is to re-invent, to reassemble inputs from the most diversified means.

Pablo Picasso drew his influences from very different sources, among which African Masks were a main source for his revolutionary Cubism movement paintings that put a final end to Academism.

However we are just about to begin a new era in media use. Not only the traditional concept of art is deceased since the advent of video, of digitalization and of the world wide web.

Trough the links provided is possible to make a tour into the History of Art of Mankind.

A BRIEF TOUR ON WHAT COULD BE THE WORK OF AN ABSTRACTIONIST PAINTER
Basically we tend to view art as a representation of what we perceive as reality. Well, just imagine you have a slide projector with an image projected unto a screen. You perceive what it is shown. However, if you move the lens and unfocus it slowly, you will notice how the image begins to change until a moment where you cannot see what is there. Yet, the image that you saw first, it is there...

Paul Cézanne said that painting was about color, shape and volume. His summary statement involves the main elements of painting as we should perceive that it is basically composed of these elements.
Composition as well as other iconographic elements do play an important part on Contemporary Art, as the notion evolves, like everything else, even when it includes all the other elements such as political, religious or pure analytical imperatives. In the pictures below I have tried to digitally operate a step by step transformation of a portrait into something of a more contemporary approach. The issue is that we must keep our minds open to what may not be common, which is not the case of this simple transformation sequence, which is just a mere rendition of what one can do with the so called reality.
 
1 2 3
I took a picture of a Sandbur warrior and applied a Fresco filter in 2 while in 3 I softened the image so that the photographic details would translate more like areas of color, a very important principle to painting.
4 5 6
In 4 I added more blur so that the areas of color would be more defined. Then in 5 I decided to use the ear ring color for the background and I added a horizontal red line that would counter the many curves of the head. The white medallion in the forehead was too striking so I added some brush strokes following the continuation of the almost unrecognizable red beads curve. I am not concerned with what it is, but rather as color and shape elements. In 6 I simulated a horizontal brush stroke effects to the right part of the image. then, to counter-balance the top left presence of red curves I added a stroke of intermittent red to the lower right corner. I have by now beginner to interfere with the image in aesthetical terms.
7 8 9
Now I took another picture 7, a group of warriors, and cropped what I considered to be the most significant part of the image 8. Then I proceeded in 9 to transform the picture into the same painting language.
10 11
Now I placed the two images side by side 10 to assess how I would incorporate the new image into the earlier. That I did here 11.
12 13 14
These three images are different final solutions or variations of a finalized work. 14 has been removed of any possible identification. Its a slow progression from a figurative composition 12 into a totally abstract rendition of what were formerly two totally identifiable images. Like Cézanne said: Painting is color, shape and volume.

TO ART DEFINITION