A problem with abstraction.

  
                                           Surface. oil on canvas. 46x106 cms.

A problem I have with abstraction is that one is painting onto a flat surface in the twenty first century when Cezanne has made a statement about being in the landscape, Peter Lanyon has made landscape relevant to personal history, Joan Mitchell has worked with landscape. There are others and I am not overlooking Paul Klee.

So where does one go on ones own. Painting what one knows? What does one know? For me the sense of being in the landscape is tied up with being in the painting as opposed to the Renaissance sense of a distant observer. Constable comes to mind as creating a sense of weather, of being wet, of making the stuff of the paint be the light, rain, wind, sun certainly recalling it viscerally. I am outside and inside: I am in it and it is in me. The problem is how to make that sense have its equivalent on that flat surface .