abstraction

I was interested to read Paula Vogel’s “Playwright’s Note” about The Long Christmas Ride Home. She wrote about the urge to empathy and the urge to abstraction, the “two volitions that underlie all artistic creation.”

I am happy to find out about the urge to abstraction. I feel at home there. The majority of writing around me is from the urge to empathy.

Abstraction:

Primitive
Egyptian
Eastern
Ashbery
“the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired …by the phenomena of the outside world…an immense spiritual dread of space”
“the refuge from the natural through the crystalline, the mathematical, the geometrical, the patterned”
distance – “to feel emotion, one must have distance”

Abstraction, a new window, a new place to go.

Concepts quoted from Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy.