ABSTRACTION

Here is an abstraction of a gull that I found on a shopping bag. Dondis states in her section on abstraction that a visually abstracted object is "a simplification of a more intense and distilled meaning."(A Primer of Visual Literacy pg. 75) Here is a an artists portrayal of a gull. While the actual gull that he saw may have been flying over the Pacific at sunset on after a long summer day at the beach, missing feathers, and wet and dirty, the message that he sends to us is that of a gull cheerfully flying, with a yellow beak, and outlined in black. While many would argue this does not match the artistic styling of Picasso I would argue that together both pictures lye in the field of abstraction.