Learn to paint Abstracts

How many times have you looked at an abstract painting and heard someone say, “I could do that!”?

While abstract painting looks easy to some, it can actually be more challenging than traditional or classical painting. This is because abstract art defies rules and conventions. It’s up to you as the artist to break rules, be expressive, and decide what is art.


By the second half of the 20th century, art was transforming rapidly. A group of New York artists including Jackson Pollock, Dutch-born William de Kooning, and Franz Kline began to push the boundaries of previous movements by focusing on the paint itself as their subject. Large-scale canvases became about the action of painting; the canvas was meant to be the remnant of an artist’s specific interaction with materials. AbEx paintings can have that “my kindergartener could have drawn that” quality to the untrained eye, but the very intentional approaches of these artists (and their tortured personal lives) reveal very real artistic contemplations.(from http://www.artsicle.com/blog/understanding-abstract-art)



These analogies to sounds came from Kandinsky’s appreciation for music, especially that by the contemporary Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951). Kandinsky’s titles often refer to the colors in the composition or to music, for example “improvisation.”Source: Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst), 1911

  1. New York Figurative Expressionism of the 1950s represented a trend where “diverse New York artists countered the prevailing abstract mode to work with the figure.”

At LifeART studio you will learn how to paint different types of Abstract Art.

Colour-Related or Light-Related
Emotional or Intuitional

Curvilinear Abstract Art

This type of curvilinear abstraction is strongly associated with Celtic Art, which employed a range of abstract motifs including knots (eight basic types), interlace patterns, and spirals. Later they returned during the 19th century Celtic Revival Movement, and the influential 20th century Art Nouveau movement: notably in book-covers, textile, wallpaper and chintz designs by the likes of William Morris (1834-96) and Arthur Mackmurdo (1851-1942). Curvilinear abstraction is also exemplified by the “infinite pattern”, a widespread feature of Islamic Art.










Colour-Related or Light-Related Abstract Art









Geometric Abstract Art








Emotional or IntuitionalAbstract Art










Gestural Abstract Art


Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning









Minimalist Abstract Art

This type of abstraction was a back-to-basics sort of avant-garde art, stripped of all external references and associations. It is what you see – nothing else. It often takes a geometrical form, and is dominated by sculptors, although it also includes some great painters. In part a reaction against the austerity of minimalism, Neo-Expressionism was mainly a figurative movement which emerged from the early 1980s onwards. However, it also included a number of outstanding abstract painters such as the Englishman Winner Howard Hodgkin (b.1932), as well as the German artists Georg Baselitz (b.1938), Anselm Kiefer (b.1945), and others.

Adieu 1982 by Georg Baselitz born 1938

2 thoughts on “Learn to paint Abstracts

  1. Hello! i’m very interested in your abstract art classes.
    When does your next class begin, and may I have some more information regarding the costs and venue?
    many thanks

    1. Hi there
      You can start at any time. Ill send u all the relevant info via email.

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