Water in the Abstract

I’ve chosen water as my theme for this week’s Lens-Art Photo Challenge: Abstract.

Water plays with the world above it, dissolving solid shapes and blocks of colour into tantalising blots and sparkling smudges.  It reflects onto man-made forms, such as bridges, confusing the eye into seeing … anything but a bridge.  It sculpts the ground beneath, making corrugated free-form patterns on a sandy beach.  And it blurs and baffles the landscape seen through a rain-spotted window.

And above the apparently endless surface of the sea, the sky’s slashed with a series of savage and expressionistic brushstrokes.

Albert Dock, Liverpool
A bridge over the Leeds-Liverpool Canal at Gargrave, North Yorkshire.
Alnmouth, Northumberland.
Rain near Bamberg, Germany.
North Sea between Rotterdam and Hull.
The River Skell at Fountains Abbey, North Yorkshire.

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #74: Abstract.

Author: margaret21

I'm retired and living in North Yorkshire, where I walk as often as I can, write, volunteer, and travel as often as I can.

24 thoughts on “Water in the Abstract”

  3. Thought-provoking selection of photographs – almost like a visual essay on the gradual emergence of abstract art with the invention of photography. The distorting effect of water captures the same blurring and masking of a recognisable scene in a similar way to some early photographs. You can see one reason why artists moved towards impressionism and then abstraction.

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      1. It’s not really my thoughts so much as the voice of one of my lecturer’s in my head, some 20 years ago, always pointing out the relationship between visual cultural production and the developments in technologies. My first encounter with this idea was the angular Moche motifs derived from their textiles produced with simple looms. Some things just stick in your mind don’t they?

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    1. As Agnes has commented, the development of photography impacted hugely on artistic expression from the later 19th century onwards. No, I don’t think it’s a stretch at all.

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