Preface
Sometimes when I am working late at night, drawing in just the right state of mind, I will produce an image that seems to have a perfect interior-exterior resonance, as if I am looking in a mirror – not one that reflects my face, but reflects my sense of being. An image that captures an abstract, deeply felt quality I have been striving for in my art for decades – an organic, living quality capable of growing and expressing itself as naturally as clouds in the sky, lichens on stone, or the clusters of red tile roofs on an Italian hilltop village. There is a timeless, living quality, accessible to everyone, which can be made manifest in everything from houses, gardens, and urban design to works of art of any size, media or subject matter. It is a quality that has resonance with what is most alive, whole, and healthy within ourselves, and it is that quality which I would like to cultivate in my work.

Origins
Back in 1981, my first formal painting instructor had all the students spend about five minutes at the start of every session creating small abstract “warm up” drawings. The point he stressed was that visual work takes place in a particular part of the brain, and it takes a conscious effort to shift from the normal verbal “left brain” state of mind into the visual “right brain” state of mind. Independent of one’s chosen style or subject matter one first needed to get into the visual mode to see “how” something was, distinct from “what” something was. These little abstract warm up drawings proved to be such an effective means of getting into that mode that I kept making them despite the fact that much of my art for the next fifteen to twenty years has had a strong left brain conceptual component.

My drawings and paintings in the 80s and 90s were all very conceptual. As an architecture student I was taken with the kind of Neo-Platonic, archetypal vision of life and the universe expressed in traditional sacred geometry from Egypt and Greece to Gothic cathedrals and Hindu temples. At the same time I was inspired by the kind of self transcendent absolutism found in the work of modernist painters like Malevich and Mondrian, and the vision of self as a force of nature expressed in the work of abstract expressionists like Pollock and Kline. These influences first led me to spend several years constructing precise geometric mandalas fleshed out with expressionistic layers of colored pencil and oil pastel. I then progressed to an equally conceptual series, constructing views into infinite space – layering geometric patterns and grids with fluid, organic patterns of spheres and irregular shapes. An underlying concept in much of this work was the balance between the rational, intellectual side of my nature and the intuitive, emotional side.

Developments
In the late 1990s I decided to go back to school, first to the University of Washington for a BA in Art History, then to Ohio State University for an MA in Art History, with a South Asia specialization. I no longer had time for large drawings or paintings but I kept up the practice of “warm-up” drawings. I worked my way through a stack of small sketch books with simple abstract line drawings – just a few drawings per week but hundreds over the decade. The series became increasingly complex, developing its own vocabulary of forms. Most of the drawings, particularly in the early years, are unremarkable, but one can see in them the seeds of what would later emerge. These were simple exercises designed to keep the right side of my brain (and the dream of being an artist) alive while most of my life was focused on some extremely left brained activity – the study of Sanskrit, reading and writing about Asian art, and creating computer models of ancient temples. But occasionally I would find myself in the proverbial “zone,” creating in a few minutes a series of shapes that seemed stronger, more resonant, and more substantial as works of art than paintings on which I had previously spent weeks or months on. While most were quite small (about 5” x 8”) some began to feel monumental.

Questions and Convictions
As I keep it up over the years I find myself wondering what to do with these images. Are they just doodles, seeds for larger works in another media, or are they independent works of art in their own right? While some seem ordinary, others strike me as great and precious things, but I have been unwilling to tear them out of the matrix of the sketchbooks which provide the individual images a larger context. Is this just my possessiveness, or the valid instincts of an archivist wanting to maintain documentation of a project’s development? Are the sketchbooks themselves the true art, and everything else derivative? Early landscape painters often sketched brilliant images full of vigor and life when out in the field, only to produce relatively lifeless oil on canvas paintings back in the studio. Strangely (to me at least) galleries, museums and collectors will still often put more value on a painting than on the most vital drawings. I have also been well aware for decades that there is a bias in the art world that sees anything that looks like graphic art or appears “designerly” as inherently inferior as a work of art when compared to works that can be described as “painterly.” It goes back to the old “fine art” vs. “craft art” framing of the discourse and assignment of value. I won’t change what I do but I can see that this categorization has placed my work (work on paper that looks “designed”), outside the rarified world of most urban galleries, collectors, museums and publications, and yet not far enough outside to be considered part of the subculture of “outsider art.” And I realize that it is not unfair to describe my work as “self-referential” – a term used somewhat dismissively to describe art that is not engaged in the current dialogue of mainstream modern art. This is true. My work has grown out of itself, developing its own syntax, grammar and vocabulary. It has its own methodology which can be applied to different media or at different scales like improvisational dances performed on different stages. But it is not “timely.” It is not a social statement about war, the environment, or the corporate state – all subjects I feel strongly about. And if it is subject to any kind of post-modern or semiotic deconstruction then I am too close to the work to see it. I do however feel with conviction that the work has life. So, without too much filtering or self censoring, I have begun scaling up some of these images to present as works of art in their own right, as “fine” as any oil painting or bronze.

Abstraction and Objectification
At some point I began to refer to these images as “Linear Abstractions,” although technically speaking they are “non-representational” or “non-objective” rather than abstract. “Abstract” art starts with something recognizable and abstracts it, but there is no positive declarative word for the art I am making except those prefixed by the negative “non-.” This is not a negative art form; it is just not about form. On the surface, or left brain level, they suggest something organic, like contour maps or cellular structures, but I think of this as the most superficial aspect of the work. I have tried to strip away content, deliberately avoiding shapes to which one can put words. The moment you name a thing, or come up with words to explain what it is about, you become stuck in the left side of the brain. Even for an artist trained in “seeing” it can take several minutes to shift into the visual mode, and the moment one starts talking or looking for titles and explanations one is yanked back into the verbal mode. Naming or inventing explanations is a very human instinct, and very hard to overcome. We even find it in our myths. The first thing Adam does in the Garden of Eden is go around naming things. Naming provides an illusion of understanding and knowledge without actual felt experience.

I was once exhibiting at an art fair where a woman came up to me and told me that one of the drawings I had on display, an abstract image of fluid and geometric patterns in space, was a picture of the AIDS virus. It is hard to argue with someone holding a checkbook (she did buy the picture) but my work is not about disease. I am trying to tap into a quality that is universal, timeless, and alive. I use abstract or “non-objective” shapes in an effort to transcend content; to get at that quality without the trappings of words. What I am after can be reached just as readily with angular shapes, fluid shapes, or geometric shapes because they are all largely incidental, like the fonts one chooses to typeset a story that has nothing to do with the font. The problem one faces with all abstraction is that so few people know how to read it. They invent translations. They project their thoughts into the image as if it were a Rorschach print, objectifying the non-objective, and generating explanations that arrest aesthetic perception. It is my hope that if the abstraction is good enough, it will draw the viewer in, away from words and toward an experience of that illusive quality that makes a thing alive.

Philip E Harding
December 15, 2007