I’ve been asked many times to teach an online course on Abstracting the Figure. I’ve taught many ‘in-person’ Workshops—or as I like to call them, ‘Playshops’—on this topic, but I needed to find a good approach to teaching this subject online. When teaching in person, we work with general concepts that can then be adapted to each individual's unique ‘style’ or approach. I wanted to make certain that any online class would offer those same possibilities to each student.

I doubt that you will find this term used anywhere else as I made it up (as far as I know) to describe the very current and contemporary use of abstraction within the figure. What does this mean?

The second Approach that we will look at is Flattening. In this Approach we ‘flatten’ the planes and shapes in the painting, removing the rendered illusion of three dimensionality. 

Patterns have had a big influence in abstraction. Since we jalready covered some history of Patterns in the Flattening Approach, we won't look at ‘How We Got To Now’ in this class as it would be redundant. Instead, let’s look at artists who use patterns in their work currently.

In this Approach, we look at Exaggerating or Distorting parts of the figure. Exaggerating parts of the body can create a mood and emphasis. Expressive hands and feet, for instance, can have a huge impact on an image as we will see in How We Got To Now. This Approach can also create an element of surprise, as it takes us out of the realm of the ‘ordinary.’

There is no doubt that inventive cropping of images came from the invention of photography. Zooming in closely and focusing on a section of the figure abstracts the image immediately. Inventive compositional cropping of an entire scene can also create an abstracted painting.

That is a mouth FULL of words to describe an Approach…I tend to call this Approach Fracture or Fractured as I see the subject matter as broken apart, sometimes disintegrating. The current favored term seems to be Disrupted Realism.

Full Length Demo of a Figurative Oil Painting