The difference between the abstract and the representational

Lea Ann's things around the house--cups she's made, a bowl I draw upside down, and plates, a rumpled-up bra on the floor--and how I'd miss them if they weren't here!

As things they're just things, you know, and I can see them for what they are. If I could show them to you you'd see what they are as they are without them being anything more or less than what you are seeing.

However, I've been trained all my life in the art of getting something from something (as have most of us), of getting at least a little more from something than I've given to it, which makes it almost impossible to see things as they are, though I can do it when I try.

When I see something real I can't imagine it not being here, you know what I mean? 

But there's something in me that wants to see something else, something beyond what I'm seeing, something else that the something I'm seeing is also becoming at the time I'm seeing it.

It may be a pure capitalistic impulse, of wanting to get something from the investment I've made in seeing something for what it is. It may be, but I don't think so.

Seeing this way I see what a big step abstraction took and is still taking, how the most powerful art of our time is art that is somewhere between the representational and the abstract, art that faces the problem of seeing something and then seeing it all over again so that it becomes something brand-new, something we can recognize though not well enough to say we've seen whatever it is we're seeing before.

Abstraction is most powerful when the personal enters it, though so much of the power of abstraction is the struggle to be rid of what's personal, or so it seems at least to me. 

And what's purely representational now has little or no power other than the power of being what it is, and/or of me knowing the maker and loving what's being made.