The Meaning Behind the Abstract

Today I took a walk around campus and tried to look for something that I could write about for my blog. I could have simply wrote about the beauty of the flowers or the nice weather that we seemed to have for the day compared to the previous days, but nothing seemed to catch my eye and made me decide to write about it. Of course there were plenty of things to write about but I guess I was just being picky. It wasn’t until I got back to my residence hall when I figured out what I would write about.

The second floor of Founders Hall has plenty of paintings. I think anyone who had seen the paintings before would say that they were painted in an abstract style. When you look at the paintings for the first time, you have no clue what to think of them. Even when you look at them for the second time, you have no clue what to think of them. In my opinion, the paintings seemed to have a lot of meanings that I could not quite understand. Even though the paintings were so complex, it was almost as if I couldn’t turn away from them. They truly make a person curious as to what the message is behind the paintings.

I took a closer look at what I was observing. I noticed the ranges of color and the usage of newspaper and words. The entire time that I was staring at the paintings I kept asking myself, “What am I looking at?” Was the artist trying to convey a certain message to the observer? Are we, the observers, supposed to make up our own message? Is there even a true message behind these paintings?

In the center of each painting there are words written in black and red. Around the words are collages of different newspaper pieces painted over in either red or green. The middle piece has a poem written by Langston Hughes called “A Dream Deferred”. Each piece contains words by the poem written in black and red. What is this supposed to mean?

http://www.cswnet.com/~menamc/langston.htm (Link to “A Dream Deferred”)

Now I’m not exactly the best at decoding the messages behind poems but the furthest I can go with what the painter might be trying to tell the observer is that dreams and words can go away. They can be hidden. The painter’s words are painted over in different colors. You can still read the words but they’re not as visible as they could be. The newspapers are painted over and the poem is painted over. People sometimes overlook the messages within the written works and in the case with the paintings and the poem “A Dream Deferred,” the poem represents any sort of written work and the painting over the poem represents the overlooking of the messages behind the written works.

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