hot summer garden by Faith Puleston Jones

I love these abstract ones you have painted, well done! Annie

Thanks for the generous comments, Annie. I couldn't find you in the artist galleries so I'm replying here! I can never decide what I like doing best: abstract or figurative work. When I'm workingin one vein I feel I want to move to the other, so I invariably have several paintings on the go at once. Lately I've had to concentrate on painting large scale florals and I'll be glad when the task is finished - oils take ages to dry so it's a long procedure. I have to admit that I can't always make sense of abstract paintings, especially when I've just read the titles of some of them. I think they are highly personalized views of the world and the painter usually expects the viewer to just let go. If the painting works for him, it's "arrived". Most of my abstracts are therefore (according to someone who paints so abstract it's hard to tell if it's a painting at all) not abstract in the true sense, but I disagree. I think anything that departs from what can actually be described as an authentic image of something and can be identified as such is in fact abstracted. How far removed from "reality" it is then depends on what the artist does with it. I have more paintings at www.faithart.net, but my latest work isn't up there just yet. Faith