What can we say about the history of abstract art?
It’s been a part of our DNA from before there was history. Marks left on pottery and on the walls of caves were not only representative of real-life animals or humans, but often were “simple, geometric, and linear forms that had a symbolic or decorative purpose.” (source)
Abstract painting for me is very symbolic. My daily practice of repetitive painting the same shapes day after day soothes me. Some people watch carpet cleaning or window washing videos for purposes of ASMR, but for me, painting shapes in my favorite shades and hues regulates my body and makes me connect. Even if it only for a few minutes each day, my practice makes me happy. It makes me an artist in a world where the pressure on creatives to make money from their artistic hobby looms large. It is the thing I do for myself.
This differentiates me from Hilma af Klint, but only slightly. In af Klint’s world, Sweden was not the European Union country it is today. My maternal great-grandfather was born in Sweden in 1890 and was put on a boat to Canada in 1905 alone as a young boy, as a way of keeping him from having to be conscripted into the ongoing secession of Norway from Sweden.
In a fight begun by Napoleon 100 years before, the tensions between Denmark, Norway, and Sweden had simmered for decades, and in 1905, when war looked as if it would break out, my great-great-grandparents, Per and Britta Enstrom, put their third son, Ernest Enstrom, on a boat bound for North America. Once he arrived, the family name changed to Engstrom, and Ernest saved for years to bring the rest of his family to America. He wasn’t able to do it in time for his father, Per, to come over, however. Per passed away in 1910 in Torsang, Sweden.
Only in the past few years have I spent time looking back at what my Grandpa Engstrom left behind in Sweden. He was one of eight children—four brothers, three sisters—and after immigrating, they all settled in various parts of the Pacific Northwest (our dog vet’s last name is Engstrom, and we’ve agreed that we’re likely distant cousins) and even Minnesota (hello to my cousins in the Midwest). I’ve been looking at Google Maps at Torsang, Sweden. It’s a small community, with an amazing kirk that I would love to visit someday, and maybe visit my great-great-grandfather’s headstone. But I think I need to do a lot more research on Ancestry.com and perhaps online at Swedish historical societies before I go. But I can dream.
Torsang is situated around an inland lake, and it looks lovely. There are teeny neighborhoods tucked in along the lake’s shores, but it’s not like the United States, which don’t offer public access to the lake. Instead of driving alongside the perimeter of a lake in my community, in Sweden, you can actually see the lake.
Part of this is that in Sweden the population is much smaller than compared to where I live in a populous county that also encompasses a large urban city. It’s not fair to compare, but it helps me to imagine how life 120 years in Sweden. And how wonderful the United States must have sounded to people, a land full of jobs and opportunity with so many people doing well (or at least that’s how it seemed). And how hard it must have been for my great-grandfather to save up all his money to bring his family over.
Hilma af Klint never left Sweden and even though she was 30 years older than my great-grandfather, I can’t imagine life was easy for her. She lived with an expectation for women to let the men have the right of way, that men were the artists, that men were the ones who were acclaimed. And Hilma said no, thanks, and took the right of way for herself. What courage!
She gives me courage to take the right of way that is in front of me. I don’t have the restrictions Hilma had, as I don’t have to explain why I want to write essays or make art as a woman. But I do have to fight the urge to self-reject, to talk myself out of taking the next step, to not stop before I get where I’m going.
I’m not alone in this, I think. One of the first steps into something new is often met with resistance. As Steven Pressfield writes in THE WAR OF ART, “Resistance obstructs movement only from a lower sphere to a higher. It kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling in the arts, launch an innovative enterprise, or evolve to a higher station morally, ethically, or spiritually. So if you’re in Calcutta working with the Mother Teresa Foundation and you’re thinking of bolting to launch a career in telemarketing . . . relax. Resistance will give you a free pass.”
Thank you for this! Yes, you have to feed your soul, no matter what.
My great-grandfather, Frank E Taylor, was the noted eccentric of the outer-London town where he lived. He was a poet, author, printer, and collector of books and engravings, who summoned rather than invited literati to his den…and who fought for people’s rights. No sewage running down the road in pipes for Franky—it would spread diseases far and wide! He appeared before the local magistrate for refusing to put a street number on his door, gate, or anywhere else on his property. How embarrassing—the last straw!
After years in food and retail trades, my grandfather, Ernest, decided to abandon all that he knew to become a farmer, for which he had zero experience. He was going to be a pioneer, and in 1912, took a 100 year lease on 14 acres of land on the outskirts of Letchworth—an English new-town that mainly existed only on the plans.
Ernest invited two others to join him. One, as the son of a newspaper editor, also had ‘limited’ farming knowledge, to say the least. The other was Gertrude Matilda Beaumont, the daughter of the owner of the grocery store where Ernest worked. Though Ernest asked her to marry him so they could set up this venture together, she declined. She would live unmarried with them both first, to see if she liked the lifestyle.
Resistance… Was this ‘small-holding’ going to be viable? Was it a wise decision, in 1912, for an unmarried young lady to move in with two men in an isolated house on the edge of civilization? The scandal! What did her parents say? What did the neighbours in London say? What reputation did Ernest and Gertrude have in Letchworth? …And what a big change to leave a comfortable home with a maid to find that, at her new home, there was no flushing toilet, no bath, no hot water, no income, no mechanisation—just 14 acres of untamed land.
Gertrude eventually did marry Ernest, and followed her own passion for landscape gardening until she was 95. (And my grand-father’s business partner continued to live in the house with them until he died, aged over 90.)
As I sit here in my studio, with many of my great-grandfather’s books beside me, and my writing and artist buddies visiting me in person, or by Zoom or email, I definitely feel his spirit watches over me, though I never met him. I do wonder how crooked people will consider my twig on the family-tree, but love that my inspirational grandparents had no regard for the opinions of others, took chances, and did what they wanted to do.
((Researching ancestors is wonderful. My middle name is Ernest, too, and for years I believed it was a family name from way-back…but it apparently derives from my great-grandfather’s friend who was best-man at his wedding: Ernest Hartley Coleridge, grandson of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But as far as I know, there’s no Taylor connection.))