Blockheads and Storied Volumes – Cubism 2.0

Michael Abraham Blockheads and Storied Volumes 7 x 5 proportion format copy

The cube paintings started In May of 2024.

The only constraint I set for myself was to work with 6-inch cubes.

Instead of ‘thinking outside the box’, I would think of the box as both a multi-sided blank canvas and a blank void. This added dimension was intended to get me back to the root of creativity where I could revel in the things that drove me to pursue art in the first place. It did!

I feel most content in the process of exploration, experimentation and delighting in engagement with line shape colour form and the illusion of space. With understanding the rules, and then having no ‘hard rules’, the process becomes play. And with the illusion of form and space painted on an actual form in space (cube) there is an added dimension.

Starting with either a few marks, a word, or a concept, the images evolved. I could explore the sides, design forms to enhance depth, manipulate for distortion or have edges disappear. The shapes change and exaggerate as visual elements are placed together. Engaging challenges arise that ask me to resolve them, especially when going around corners, adding surprise and pleasure to the creative process. I hope that you are pleased and surprised as well! 🙂

Les Demoiselles

(available)

Lines and curves and blocks of colour – four ladies on a cube, here I’m taking the cubist Picasso back to reality on the cube and turning the corner – the eyes do follow, with the female gaze upon the viewer – I am always amazed that with the simplicity of a few lines and a few curves one can insult, offend, titillate or woo. We are all shape shifting from conception to dust.

Tête Carrée- Ceramic

(available)

Tête carrée (the French words for square-headed) was what some of us English speaking kids were derogatorily or teasingly called by our Québécois neighbours. Artists have often tried to imbue their art with a live spirit. With eyes that follow and see everything this friendly grotto-esque character resides in his own boxed in corner of the world. If two viewers stand side by side, it appears that he can look at both of us simultaneously.

Pearl of Wisdom

(available)

Creating with curves and straights – Surprise oneself – exploration. Walk through the unknown to the known. An act of faith. ‘Feel the fear and do it anyways’ and it will lead to the pearls of wisdom.

Field of Excitation

(on hold)

Field of Excitation ?– String Theory?

In electromagnetism, excitation is the process of generating a magnetic field by means of an electric current. In the case of a machine with field coils, a current must flow in the coils to generate (excite) the field, otherwise no power is transferred to or from the rotor. In the field of Physics, the nomenclature for theories and concepts can conjure up some imaginative visuals, even if the concepts themselves may be sometimes hard to grasp.

I imagined the sun to be in the box. Dancing in a field, a couple is sunlit from above, but also are above the sun when the box is viewed from on high. The woman receives a gold ring on her finger, teetering in the edge of two flat planes, the ring finger rounds one edge of the box giving the illusion of three dimensions. From one vantage point the couple appears alone. From another vantage point you can see the excitation of the celebrants in the field. Can you feel the magnetism!

Carrier Box

(sold)

Painted with the tiny delicacy of a Fra Angelico predella, the storied sides of this cube have characters interacting with their boxes in a variety of ways. This includes one figure who is splayed and exhausted, and another standing on his box looking searchingly to the distance.

Apple Box – Hornby Meadow

(sold)

Near our rustic-woods and sandstone coastline ‘go to’ place there is an orchard that always makes me feel alive and grateful. It’s a place where in summertime one can ride a bike around the island, or lay in the grass or swim in the buff. And one is always aware of open space. One never wants those days of eating up the pleasures of summer and nature to end. The intention was to capture all that space in a 6 inch cube.

Block Heads

(available)

The painting of a head can start with a simple profile.

Painting can be intentional or arbitrary, carnivalesque or classical.

Cultures hold dear their ethnographic styles. Visual practitioners attempt to reveal the intrinsic qualities and spirit of their subjects by observing the particularities of their graphic elements – line, form, shape, pattern, tone, and structure- and then enhancing, simplifying, or manipulating them. Living in a globally aware and connected world, artistic elements seem to meld into a huge palette for consideration.

It was enjoyable scumbling paint across the pumice textured peaks of this cube, allowing for areas of pointillistic subtlety and broken colour.

Cubist Block Party

(available)

Some paintings paint themselves. A mark can tell you what to do next. Sometimes a decision needs to be made – sometimes a rule is set – sometimes a rule is broken. Rules can be freedom. Rules can be limiting. Freedom can be a party. Freedom can be frightening.

The creative process is a funny thing. I set out with the intention of making heads fall into squareness using the corners of the box as a guide, but not stuck to the idea …possibility and choice… hmmm….. add a curved line, add a couple of diagonals and then the party hats suggested they be there! Yay! Cubist Block party!

Flower Box

(on hold)

The distortion of faces, with eyes swinging up and distorting as the view changes intrigued me and somehow makes Picasso’s art make that much more sense! A two dimensional image painted on a three-dimensional space seems perceptually holographic. We are spirits experiencing form in three dimensions. I often wonder if ‘spirit’ is dimensionless.

We are all flowers in the garden of life.

Niche

(sold)

Symbols can take on the meanings we want give them… purity, surrender, hope, valiance, purpose, charity, clarity, surrender, strength… The niches of churches often contain statuary of saints, patrons, and mythological figures.

This niche box is peopled with four figures from my imagination: a wide grinning mystic at peace above the flames, the purposeful warrior with her sword & candle of hope, the upholder of purity and strength with a unicorn, and mother pure heart.

Dog Box – Variety Pack

(available)

How many dogs have been told “Go in your box!”

The surprise in the initial painting stage was in the way the tongue of the German shepherd, and some noses shifting from drooping to sticking up as one rotates the box!

Mixed Flock – Bird Box

(sold)

There is so much variety in nature.

Steam Box

(on hold)

There is so much variety in nature.

Shape Shifting

(available)

Freedom to play with visual perception takes some control and discipline. I took a walk around the block, playing with the elemental forms (the sphere, cylinder, cube, cone and torus/donut) and a variety of colour combinations. The corners of the cube were made less obvious by painting a ‘floating’ block, a brick and a red-spotted die on them; a surreal scape appeared.

Box of Fireworks

(available)

Cubism attempts to show many sides at once.

Odd distortions emerged immediately upon starting the initial mark making for this image, From certain vantage points the image looked right. And so I continued with faith. The figures look across at each other from one angle. Or when viewed from the top the fireworks are below the two figures are looking up beyond the display of lights. As one is always looking for a philosophical significance, I assumed the faces flattening out on the top may suggest an ideal that works on paper but a perfection that may be be a little more complicated to achieve in reality. And this made me happily carry on to the end.

Unicorn Box – Cornerstones

(available)

One can imagine the pleasure that Stonemasons of the past felt when they designed and carved gargoyles, grotesques and the quirkier characters of historiated capitals and ornamental stone statues. Public engagement and having creative fun, while attempting to ward off evil spirits was a lofty purpose!

I painted directly on a pumice-textured cube. Deeply painted shadows create high relief. When viewed from the right vantage points, the unicorn’s stub of a horn and the shriekingly-excited male character’s glans pop forth while the woman’s ‘botox’ lips, and a Pokémon-like bear suggest modern gentility.

Sculpture Garden – Three Graces

(sold)

Here’s a block of blue sky with three graces and statues to enjoy in the open vista. A single figure holds an offering of flowers as tribute to eternal beauty.

Drawing Box

(available)

Heavy handed in grade one, I can still see myself tearing the paper as I tried to print “the elephant in the telephant.” The school wanted to hold me back a grade due to poor coordination, but my father, being a Hungarian strongman, insisted his child would not be held back.

I enjoy looking around the room at the other artists when they draw. They don’t usually know they are being looked at.

Drawing someone or something that is in front of us and spending the time really looking is both a challenge and a pleasure. It reveals to us what we would otherwise miss. There is always more to see, be it in the rhythms of the hair, or the undulations of form revealed by side lighting.

Even in the scurrying of the pencil on the page, there is a calm stillness of mind in the practice of drawing.

Vancouver Box Special

(available)

Be it a tree fort, castle, or modern living space, they all start with an architect’s dream. Humans love to design and build.

Recollections on Intrigue, Bemusement, Exploration and Play:

Visual perception and sensory experience have intrigued me since childhood and my memories often combine the visual and physical.

I can see myself back in time with legs up the wall, singing while staring at abstract wallpaper. Or sitting in the bath with running water while gazing at perceived faces in floor tile, or losing track of time while staring at clouds. I can still taste the salt of the slushy snow water puddle that I sucked up a 30-inch-long plastic horn, while in the parking lot during the local winter carnival. Am I the only one who touched two fingertips together while going cross-eyed, thereby seeing a floating kidney bean shape two inches from the tip of my nose?

Once I was a pint-sized Merlin bending rainbows! Little did I know that a few days of dragging my dad’s powerful u-shaped magnets across our cathode ray tube screen would destroy the picture of our family television. Oops!

For reasons unknown, around the age of ten, I had the compulsion to take fat finger sized charcoal sticks and cover every square inch of every page of a colouring book. When the pages were totally black and as powdery as can be, I tore out and folded up each page and packed them all into a clear plastic bag to donate to the church bazaar fundraiser. They sold! – making my grandmother my first patron. I like to believe my grandmother sensed my brilliance, but I laugh now thinking she may have felt sorry for me. 😉

I recall devouring my dad’s art books and finding images that I fixated on, such as Mondrian’s squares and lines, or the rounded face in a Pontormo fresco or the strangely coloured angels and pale exposed flesh of Jean Fouquet’s ‘Madonna and Child’ (c.1450). I have always had an innate appreciation of form, and I am always pulled towards art that made the elements of art obvious enough for me to learn from.

An inexplicable inner drive from my later teens onward was to understand how to create illusion, dimension, depth, form…. and that drive has never gone away.