Project 365 day 98: rhubarb brain

I've been photographing the emerging rhubarb leaves for a while, but not posted any. These deeply grooved zigzag patterns make me think of brains; the scrambled effect is probably a good representation on mine just now.

Today's "fill the frame" theme for Abstract Thursday made me realise that this is my default approach to abstract shots, as it removes shape and colour from their context, reducing the importance of the object or scene from which the image is abstracted. Yesterday I supported my daughter at the Wednesday online "Art Talk" run by her care centre: they were discussing the work of Georgia O'Keefe, whose art I started to love when we explored the wonderful Tate Modern exhibition a few years ago. Her paintings are rooted in her surroundings, especially landscape and the flowers for which she is probably best known, but become increasingly abstract as she focuses intensely on shape and colour, often by cropping very tightly to amplify details in what are effectively enormous macro images of parts of flowers, or by simplifying images of the empty New Mexico landscape into sculptural shapes, or the intense contrasts of her sunlit courtyard and doorway into crisp blocks of colour. She was influenced by photography, and was married to photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who was a proponent of photography as a visual art form and took a series of photographs of clouds which are often considered to be among the first intentionally abstract photos.

Thank you Ingeborg for hosting Abstract Thursday.