What Abstraction Means to Me

When I was seven years old, I was prescribed eye glasses for the first time.  Up until then, everything was a blur.  I didn’t know what the real world looked like.  When other children chimed, “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” I didn’t know what they meant.  They sort of hopped and stepped funny as we walked along a sidewalk, so I did, too.

            I got my glasses after school one afternoon in late autumn when the days were growing shorter and dusk came on early.  As I walked home from the optometrist’s office, I avoided stepping on lines across the sidewalks.  I didn’t want to break my mother’s back.

            I was so entranced in my new surroundings that I forgot to go home.  I walked through the dusk and into the darkness.  I was gone so long, my mother sent my brothers out to find me.

            Before they found me and took me home, I looked at details in this new world.  I saw window frames and curtains. I saw light bulbs and their glow of light.  I saw shadows.  I was enthralled with everything around me.

            My life became a world of distinct colours, lines and shapes.  Kootenay Lake wasn’t just a place in which to swim.  It was ripples and waves and reflections.  Elephant Mountain wasn’t just a dark blob in the distance.  It was trees and rocks.  The trees had leaves and the leaves had lines, and shades of green that shifted back and forth from light to dark in the breeze.  The rocks had shapes, and colours that intensified when it rained.  There were tiny ants and spiders that had legs.  Gates had hinges.  Eyes had lashes.  There was no end to the detail I saw in my everyday life. 

            When I bought my first good camera and attached my telephoto lens, I aimed the camera at the minute details I had been admiring for over thirty years.  When the film was developed and I received the 4 inch x  6 inch prints, I loved what I saw.  The photographs were beautiful.  And they looked abstract.

            Twenty years later, when Clint and I travelled to art galleries in London and Paris, and I saw my first large abstract paintings, the tiny details my eyes had always seen were now 4 feet by six feet or larger.  The colours, lines and shapes totally satisfied every nerve in my body.  I fell in love with abstraction.  It was the beauty I had been looking at all my life, especially in nature.  Only I wasn’t looking at tiny details.  I was seeing the details large and bold.

            When I started painting, I painted with music playing in my tape deck, especially classical compositions by Chopin and Beethoven, rock music by the band, Dire Straits, and guitar solos by Jeff Beck.  I think it was the originality and spontaneity of the music that appealed to me.  The sound seemed different, unusual, interesting.  Almost abstract.  It inspired me to paint with abandon.

            Abstraction is how I see the world every day.  My eyes seem to isolate details whether I’m standing in front of the Grand Canyon or sitting in a dentist chair.  And in that isolation I see colour, lines and shapes.  The perfect combination for abstract art.

Nancy Robertson

April 2025

Prince Rupert, BC