Video: Creating Abstract Art: Determining Essence of Subject

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Abstract art often attempts to focus on realistic aspects of a subject. Compare a realistic painting with an abstract painting with the tips in this free art lesson from an art instructor.

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Video Transcript

When you think about it, a drawing or a painting is already an abstraction because it's putting into two dimensions, into a flat surface something that was originally three dimensional. So it's already an abstraction, but within that we have a sense of what is realistic and what is abstract. And abstract, if you think about it, it means that you're pulling out the essence of something. Now you're doing that whether you're concentrating on realism or not. So we're going to look at a couple of examples of what abstract might be. This is actually something we would call realistic. This is a drawing by Lucas Cranach. And you can see that he was very interested in getting very close to life. The face is really sort of a finished drawing, with everything in place, the highlight on the lip and everything. That's an example.

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Creating Abstract Art: Determining Essence of Subject

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