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What can you obtain from looking at abstract art? Aside from its form and structure, can anyone truly understand what the artist wishes to convey at first glance?

Have you ever looked at something only to become more confused the longer you stare?

This is how abstract art appeals to the general public. It’s a frame of randomness, swirling shapes, and distinct patterns stacked one after the other. In simpler terms, it can be deduced as a mess – an artistic mess that’s supposed to draw out an emotion or insight from its audience. Some prefer to call this non-objective art, defining its structure. But the term abstract art is what stuck across the board.

By its definition, abstract means an unsystematic and unstructured art form. If not a surge of emotion, it can make people believe they can be artists themselves.

How hard can abstract art be?

With its ambiguity and lack of a solid object representation, abstract art can seem the easiest to create. One can throw paint at an empty canvas, do some swirls here and there, and call it a day. Chances are, it can already be framed and displayed at a museum afterward.

Unlike landscape or realism art styles, abstract art doesn’t focus on a single object as its muse. Instead, it focuses on the whole, the bigger picture, to derive or withdraw some emotion or opinion from its audience. Within its frames, the art’s complete visual is highlighted. It emphasizes the quality of merging colors and shapes. And although it might seem like a mess, it’s evidence of a thin line separating a beautiful mess from an atrocious one.

As the founder and the hands behind the October Sun Studious, LTD, Jeanne Henderson aims to reach out to everyone, artist or not, and ask them to open their souls to art. As an artist who studied under several master visual artists, it’s Jeanne’s priority to convey emotion and a message through her art. In fact, the artist had mentioned her current work goal, stating her desire to go beyond realism.

It could be due to feeling limited or the pure desire to explore life and energy that made her do so. But either way, Jeanne wants her art to teach an emotion to her audience, and one way of achieving this is through maximizing abstract art as an art form and medium.

What Defining Art Shouldn’t Be

Abstract art is still art. And like its numerous counterparts, what lies behind its chaotic yet intricate structure is meaning. Artists don’t make it for the sake of making something. They still have a message they wish to convey, leaving the ability to unravel their art to the audience.

Everyone wants to make sense of art, but they’re doing it incorrectly.

When people go to a museum, most aim to simplify every artwork into a single sentence – that’s making sense of art. They want to describe what they see within the frame, bedazzling it with terminologies and adjectives to finish. It makes them sound smart, like an expert trying to explain what they see to amateurs. However, in doing so, people are barking up the wrong tree.

That isn’t how art is defined.

Art is something that can’t be explained with words, and so is abstract art.

Beginning to Understand the Puzzle

Upon looking at it, people don’t define it by the number of lines or the shades of colors splashed on the canvas. Instead, art’s meaning is derived from its influence on people. Explaining art isn’t achieved by words but by nonverbal interpretation, the emotion it draws from people. Defining abstract art by attempting to pinpoint an image goes against the art’s essence.

The audience must look at the abstractness of this art and open themselves to a new experience. They must allow themselves to be taken by the art, and only then will they experience its full effect. Understanding abstract art happens by welcoming its impact. It’s pausing before the artwork, absent of any judgment, and truly allowing every stroke, every brush to speak.

This art doesn’t utilize a truthful depiction. Hence, understanding it doesn’t follow the norm as well. Instead, it uses non-objective elements. It’s an explosion of everything, and by taking everything in, the audience will learn to see the artist’s ideas beyond the physical reality.