Many African-American and Black South African artists, like their counterparts worldwide, communicate emotions and feelings abstractly rather than representationally. Richard Mahew, in his "Indigenous Spiritual Space Series # 7," expresses landscape ideas through modulated color. The results are highly personalized, colorful, and beautiful works that strike a chord that is shared by the viewer. Freddie Styles canvases are fields of variant tonalities that are resonant with human experience. These works establish that the expression of passion and ideas is not limited to representational vocabularies. Kevin Cole and Omar Thompson use music and musical concepts in creating their works. Dissonance, for example, can be seen in "In the Twilight of Apartheid" by Omar Thompson, lyricism in Kevin Cole's "Rapped in Pride II," and in Ed Dwight's "Eubies Hands." William Tolliver spoke of his abstract art as music and universal. Muzi Donga's abstract works range from the lyrical to the geometric to the cerebral whereas Winston Soali, in his abstract expressionistic works, seem fascinated by the emotional aspects of man, such as loneliness, anxiety, dignity, and spirituality. Global Expressionism, in The Shared Understanding Project, is the communication of feelings and emotions without figurative reference to ethnicity or race. It is a means of communicating what we all share, i.e., our humanness. |
