“Signs” from Bosch’s “Triptych”.

I found these paintings I did in my first year at Art University in Timisoara, Romania, on my sister’s computer, and I was excited because I had lost all my stored files (photos, pictures, paintings…everything!). I remember that we had to choose one painting where there was a lot of movement, and then try to see it in a more abstract way, represented by simple shapes. So we basically had to “simplify” a known art work. I chose a detail from Hieronymus Bosch‘s “Triptych”. And then, from what we came up with, we had to choose a couple of elements to further use in an abstract composition, as signs.

See the original painting, read more on Bosch and watch the process of creating abstract art, with a given start point, after the jump!

On top you can see my simplified version (this is the first painting I did, and then followed the one on top of this page) of this detail painted by Bosch:

Hieronymus Bosch was a prolific Early Netherlander painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Many of his works depict sin and human moral failings. Bosch used images of demons, half-human animals and machines to evoke fear and confusion to portray the evil of man. The works contain complex, highly original, imaginative, and dense use of symbolic figures and iconography, some of which was obscure even in his own time. He is said to have been an inspiration for the surrealist movement in the twentieth century.

Studying more and really looking closely at his paintings, you can indeed see the grotesque, the “demons” that probably haunted him. We all have our own demons, don’t we? Some just express it through painting…