On Abstraction & Painting
In 2008 my husband and I drove up to Baltimore, Maryland to see the exhibit “Finding Our Place in the World” at the Walters Art Museum. Among the many fascinating cartographic treasures on display were Leonardo Da Vinci’s hand-drawn walking map of Florence, Italy; Japanese Buddhist pilgrimage maps marking important overlook viewpoints along the route--emphasizing the process of journey, rather than the topography; an Inuit map carved into the perimeter of a wooden stick--a waterproof, buoyant, marking system of the coastal land formations that were visible from a kayak, and a map of the London Tube system. In 1931 Harry Beck redrew the London Tube map as the abstraction of essential information for an underground journey. The actual topography through which the passenger was traveling was totally irrelevant, as was distance between stops, what was relevant was where lines intersected, the order of the stops, and the relative orientation of stations within the city. This idea of abstraction for the sake of clearer navigation fascinated me, and made clear a tension that I had been working through in terms of thinking about art. Abstraction became much more clear to me as a language of expressing the essence of a thing, experience, or place, than purely representational art. I would like to draw a distinction here between abstraction of a real object and merely non-representational art. I do think there is a difference; the terms ought not to be used interchangeably.
I see paintings as signposts. They are signposts to the harmony of individual experience of sight, atmosphere, and scale existing between the tension of space and time. They point to something recognizable, a symbol of the thing sought, but they are not the thing itself. They point to the real object: place, person, or thing. They point to wholeness in the midst of chaos.
My hope in painting is to communicate, in some small way, the truth of experience of place, pointing to a time that is recognizable in your own experience, either remembered or hoped for, and so reinforce the essential harmony of our lives.
About Rebecca
Rebecca Coffin Anderson comes from a family of artists; being immersed in the arts from both sides of her family gave her an innate love for creating art that carried her through college, career, and raising a family. Rebecca studied drawing and painting with her parents, Jennifer & David Coffin, as well as both her grandmothers, Gretchen Quie and Edith Coffin. She also studied drawing with local portrait artist Timothy Chambers. Rebecca holds a degree in English literature from Grove City College where she also studied printmaking and sculpture with internationally renowned sculptor Peter Calaboyias.
Rebecca’s work reflects her love of literature, fairytale, language, organization of ideas, and the outdoors. She is an amateur naturalist and has focused on watercolor painting for the last 15 years. She now spends her time working in her home studio with jars of natural artifacts lining her shelves, waiting to be made into paint or charcoal. Rebecca currently resides in Middletown, Virginia.
