I always admired the middle abstract expressionists
This is one of the most famous paintings in history, but I never quite understood it.
It’s inspired so many things in regular design that it’s difficult to actually pinpoint the inspirations. I’ve seen probably over 150 objects in my regular life from coffee mugs to t-shirts to standing walls that had some kind of callback to this painting.
I think the combination of colors and lines is something representative of like a neural archetype or “an engram”, it’s like something you see when you look straight into the sun, fatigue your cones and look away, but on a neural level.
Not an art critic, just an alien dropping two cents.
The one thing I do see is that anyone can create art / patterns like this, so be inspired rather than demoralized.
Thanks for posting this OP, you made me think about a painting 💙
I like to imagine myself as someone in the 60s before visual arts were available everywhere and if you wanted to look at pictures of things you had to go to the library and imagine in that context what it must have been like to be a painter. In a strange way this painting of boxes captures the drama of actual paintings with figures and tricks our brains to imagine there is a composition within the patterns itself and then as you say this pattern then went on to inspire more things. Incredible to think about really and one of the reasons I like abstract and modern art despite being the type of person who would have thought “anyone could have done this” 25 years ago when I was young lol.
