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Director's Message

This is the seventh book in the Fine Art Books series created by the Department of Art & Design at Utah Valley University. As we prepared for this book, we saw an opportunity to take a conceptual journey, rather than a physical one, and emphasize a distinct form of artistic expression: abstraction.

We asked contributors to depart from realism and to utilize the elements of design: color, shape, texture, and form to their own end. Artists were given the liberty to create anything they desired that was abstract or metaphorical.

The hope with this book is to provide an opportunity for artists and audience to explore something new. By exploring innovative approaches, new connections and ideas can be formed. What happens when we create images that rely less on the power of description and more on efforts to evoke raw emotion? Artists have always done this to varying degrees. With the removal of representation, focus can be given more singularly to the emotional experience.

Art, in all its iterations, is a form of communication. Abstraction is a natural evolution in this process. Just because you may not understand a particular language does not diminish the beauty or value of these different forms of expression. Artists can create work that does not have to rely on time or place in its creation.

That is what we hope for here, the location we explored is more of a journey than a destination. Where this journey takes you is dependent upon what you contribute to this experience. We ask the audience to suspend their comfort in the known, and then traverse into a world populated by our senses and our subconscious.