Painting Abstracts, Rolina Van Vliet – Book Review

Right.  We’re into the modern day at last. It’s late 2018 and I’ve finally started to feel like a decent artist, producing paintings that I can actually sell.  From now on, I’m looking for books that can genuinely help me develop as an artist.  Content is more important than price or page count (I’m still counting, though. 172 pages in this one).  And the first book I invested in was one on abstract painting.

It wasn’t a great start to be honest.  It’s not a watercolour book but I knew this when I bought it, expecting that there would at least be some theoretical content in the book about what makes for a good abstract painting.  There was content there but not as much as I was hoping for – I found it to be minimal.  The book also suffered from a lack of passion – just like with that Richard Taylor book on watercolour landscapes, it sounded like it had been written by a dalek.  And I thought that if there’s one thing a book on abstract painting needed, it was a bit of passion.

Most of the book was made up of 65 exercises that are set for the reader.  In each case there was a painting provided as an example of the exercise being completed. I just wished something was said about these paintings though.  I thought the book would be so much more beneficial to the reader if each of those paintings was followed by some commentary about what was or wasn’t good about them.

But now, a couple of years later, I’ve moved on as an artist.  I still haven’t found that perfect book that will turn me into a master abstract artist but I’m not sure such a book exists.  The hardest thing about painting abstracts is having to start out with no personal style and loads of imposter syndrome.  It’s why books like this seem useless at first.  But once you’ve found a style and started to lose the imposter syndrome, it’s worth revisiting these books again, that’s when you find they’re a great source of inspiration.  Full of ideas about new things to try.  In my case, with my penchant for either (i) dividing up the page into abstract sub paintings, or (ii) abstractifying iconic scenes from Westerns, there are loads of ideas in this book for how to do that.  I’m happier with this book now.  I did up the rating for this one to three palettes but, after reading the John Lowry book in painting abstracts, have put it back down again to two palettes.  Half the problem with abstracts is knowing how to get started and, whereas John covers this, Rolina unfortunately doesn’t.