Abstracted objective painting

One of my favorite artists, Georgia O'Keeffe, once stated "It is surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it's a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me, that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint." Much earlier this past year I experimented with the Fibonacci spiral based on the Golden Mean ratio of 1:1.618 (the study to the left is one of the experiments). This proportion is completely mathematical and, therefore, abstract. There's a better explanation of this in one of my earlier blogs. Although this painting is only a study, an interesting effect and new meaning occurs because I've imposed abstract design on the eggshells. Are they spiraling down a drain? Are they rising up through a tornado? Are they tunneling sideways? There's force, direction, dynamism. It's not just about broken eggshells, but about something acting on them causing them to move in a spiral. This implies not only volumetric space but also time, the fourth dimension. O'Keeffe offers us a valuable lesson in how to make our work dynamic, meaningful, and original.