Abstractions

I mentioned that I have been following the Dakar Rally, a 14 day rally raid that this year traversed terrain in Argentina and Chile. It should be no surprise that I used images from the rally to fill some of the pages of my sketchbook, pages that had swoops of paint that vaguely reminded me of some of the stages of the race. The last stage was yesterday which coincided with the last page of this sketchbook. So here you see that I teased out an overhead scene over two facing pages, superimposing the Dakar Rally trademark image over it. For fun, I used a brush and India ink to fill in the lightly penciled in basic shapes.

I have always been fascinated by this image. It is only angled slashes topped by a jagged line. Yet one can clearly see the desert Bedouin it represents. I wish my mind could easily reduce reality to such simple lines but I get caught up in literal representations of what I see, and not the basic components. Abstraction does not come easily to me. But viewing this image again reminds me I'd like to learn some tricks in how to approach abstraction.