*Abstract or not abstract: that is the question...*

In my original collage I included a lot of things that describe me. Some of these include photos of my family and friends, sheet music, song quotes, Disney stuff, teacher-y things like crayons, the Lorax and the Magic School Bus emblem. I have a hard time with collages because I am very much a scrap booking kind of person. I like things to be neat and lined up and not too cluttered, so I had a hard time cluttering my collage enough to get a good abstract. I ended up adding things to my collage. The most difficult thing about the abstraction process for me was the technology. I had a very hard time trying to figure out the iphoto application so I just did it on an application I was more familiar with, Print Shop. The abstraction process itself wasn’t difficult; it was just a matter of choosing which abstraction to post because the options are literally endless. When it comes to the question of success as an abstraction, that entirely depends on your definition of abstract. I personally think of abstract as something that isn’t anything. A painting with three lines on it, for example, I would see as abstract. If the artist were to tell me what those three lines were I might change my label of that painting. Because I know what my abstraction is of, I don’t see it as an abstraction. Although someone else with my same definition might see my piece as abstract because they don’t know what it is of. So the meaning is what really matters to me in terms of abstract or not.