What Is a Contemporary Abstract Artist? An Existential Inquiry
What does it truly mean to be a contemporary abstract artist? Beyond labels and techniques lies an inquiry into feeling, perception, and the very essence of human seeing.
Introduction
When I sit before a blank canvas, dipping twine into oil paint or pulling a line across resin-coated wood, I often wonder: What am I really doing here? People call me a contemporary abstract artist — but what does that actually mean? Is it just about creating non-representational work? Or is it about something deeper: an existential stance towards life, perception, and reality itself?
Today, I invite you into this question with me.
Beyond Style: Abstraction as Inquiry
At first glance, abstract art is defined by what it is not — it doesn’t depict literal objects, people, or landscapes. But for me, and for many contemporary abstract artists, abstraction is not a style. It is a way of asking:
What lies beneath what we see?
How can form express feeling rather than depict reality?
Can we create something that feels true, even when it isn’t representational?
Being a contemporary abstract artist means living in this inquiry. Each painting is a proposal, not an answer. A possibility, not a statement.
Contemporary Context: Art in the Age of AI and Literalism
We live in a time flooded with imagery — AI-generated perfection, photorealistic filters, endless scrolling visuals. In such a world, abstraction becomes radical. It refuses easy interpretation. It cannot be reduced to keywords or replicated by an algorithm.
To paint abstractly today is to create space for feeling rather than recognition. It is to say: There is meaning beyond what you see. And often, that meaning is formless, emotional, and deeply human.
Existential Identity: Who Am I When I Paint?
Sometimes I ask myself:
Am I creating, or am I allowing something to emerge?
Am I the artist, or simply the medium through which this feeling passes onto canvas?
To be a contemporary abstract artist is to hold these paradoxes lightly. I am not here to impose an idea onto the world. I am here to let the world move through me, filtered by memory, philosophy, movement, intuition, and texture.
The Emotional and Philosophical Lens
At its heart, abstract art is emotional. Its language is not words or narrative, but sensation, rhythm, gesture, and space. This is why people often stand before an abstract painting in silence, moved by something they cannot name.
I believe contemporary abstract artists are translators of the unseen. We paint the feeling of time, the shape of an unspoken memory, the pulse of becoming. We make visible the inner weather of being human.
Questions I Ask Myself (and You May Too)
What do I want my paintings to do in the world?
Am I painting to express, to question, to soothe, to provoke — or all of these?
How do my materials (oil, twine, epoxy, wood) reflect my values and inquiries?
What is the balance of control and surrender in my practice today?
Who am I becoming, through abstraction?
Closing Reflection
So, what is a contemporary abstract artist?
Perhaps it is someone who creates from a place of not-knowing. Someone who feels the tension between control and spontaneity, and turns it into color, texture, and space. Someone who knows that life is not always literal — it is layered, fluid, mysterious.
And so is art.
