Robin Sperling is a British abstract painter living
in eastern Hungary.
Abstract paintings
- what are they about? Do they show us things - the way a
picture of some flowers shows us those flowers?
Or are they about whatever you want? It must be about something
we see, or else painters wouldn't paint it, but people disagree
just how.
a
photograph by Sperling of his own reflection in his blue painting
'Obscura'
Abstract painter Robin Sperling is clear that an array, a pattern,
shows us things in front of us, just as much as images do. He
does not agree an abstract painting is about whatever the viewer
wants to see in it, like a Rorschach ink blot. Nor need
abstract paintings be mainly about something inside the artist.
They don't have to be mainly about the artist's mood, for example.
'Point to Line'
He says an abstract painter can show us a picture of a set of lines,
a space, a set of planes, something abstract out there in the world
we see - can depict these things - as surely as
a figurative artist can show us a picture of a tree to depict it.
Painting about "ordering chaos
into sacredness"
~
Robin Sperling has been a full-time abstract artist since leaving the
prestigious St. Martin's College of Art in London in the
1980s. After several years of doing art in Berlin, he has been living with
his Hungarian wife Georgina and their four children for the past two years in
a remote village on the Hungarian 'puszta', or Great Plain, by the river
Tisza.
Painting titled 'Longitudinal Lines of Chaos'
The sheer flatness and emptiness of the place attracted him here. He
talks a lot about the interaction of verticals and horizontals, the
central artistic puzzle he has been working on for almost a decade.
And on the puszta something else, something more archaic and tribal,
something not purely an issue of space and line, hangs in the air.
Painting titled 'Longitudinal Lines of Chaos'
