What distinguishes abstract painting from random mark making? Composition
How can you tell if an abstract paining is “good.” If nothing definitive is being depicted, what makes a successful abstract painting elevated from random marks? Composition.
Think of a painting’s composition of marks – brushstrokes, drips, dabs, dots, etc., their size, color and placement – like sound. What is the difference between noise and music? Noise is jarring. Unorchestrated. Music is composed. It’s the quality, selection, and arrangement of sounds creating a composition that makes music, same as an abstract painting arranges all of its seemingly discordant marks into a harmonious composition.
Here we have an abstract artwork from Dusti Bongé showing how otherwise random, non-representational marks, when put together by an artist in a composition, creates a pleasing, cohesive painting.
Analysis of the artwork comes from Ligia M. Römer, Executive Director of the Dusti Bongé Art Foundation.
Dusti Bongé, Untitled (Two Black Rectangles with Lines and Dots), 1960, ink on paper, 16 ½” x 21 ¾”
This week’s artwork technically does not feature grids but does fit into what we might call grid-adjacent compositions. In these works, Dusti Bongé still relies on using horizontal and vertical lines to create a geometric arrangement. However, here it appears that she has pulled apart the vertical lines from the horizontal ones.
At first glance this composition is still deceptively simple like the grids. Dusti has relegated the horizontals and verticals to the left and the right of the canvas. However, there are structural moves going on that make for a dynamic overall arrangement.
The horizontal lines are all drawn to the left of center while the vertical lines start at the center and move rightward from there. The horizontal marks are contained within a tall rectangular shape, whereas the verticals are arranged in a square frame that opens up in the lower right. One vertical brush stroke is also extended up past the frame. The rectangle and square are just barely linked by a single short horizontal stroke.
In addition to the separated verticals and horizontals, Dusti makes use of a loose pattern of stippling that she did not typically introduce in her grids, but used often in her surrealist works. In fact, this pattern goes right along with the automatic nature of mark making that the grid lines also have.
The dots are loosely dabbed around the respective frames of the rectangles, except for in the top right quadrant where the background remains blank.
Together all these subtle moves create an asymmetrical, very well balanced play between the two rectangles, and their respective relationships to the background.
