Concept Attainment: A Model to Understand Abstraction

My Number Three Daughter produced this piece on corrugated stock, I call it, Souvenir of Cezanne (2010), in August of that year when she was three years old. I recently asked her at age five if she recalled doing the work and she did not. Of course, proud Dad's are prone to this sort of collecting, naming, and labeling behavior. For me, it reminds me of Cezanne's splash of color in flat blocks without significant shape modeling or shadows. As I recall, this was one of the first efforts if not the first piece whereby she covered the entire surface with color leaving no gaps. I recognized that as a milestone for her development and retained the piece because of that. So why do I show this today?

Original Art: Souvenir of Cezanne Copyright James E. Martin 2010

There are attributes in Daughter's painting that make me think of Cezanne. There is Conceptual Similarity based on my experience and perception. And yet, her rendition is nothing like Cezanne.

I submit the following model of Hierarchy of Concept Development and Attainment to show some of the cognitive and emotive machinations we go through to identify and learn new concepts and how we differentiate concepts with intention to Explore and Innovate. It has been useful to me in the Realm of Art:

• Sensation  (Sight, Hearing, Taste, Touch, Smell, Proprioceptive)
• Attention (Focus on some things not others)
• Perception (Assigning meaning to what we sense; Patterns; Correlate to memory)
• Imagery (Develop an internal construct image in memory based on the external object)
• Labeling (Assign a name and taxonomy for the internal and external objects)
• Emotional Attribution (Assign emotional meaning to internal and external objects, i.e. like or dislike, trust or distrust, etc.)
• Concept Formation (Develop a higher level complex object with numerous attributes based on exemplars and non-exemplars)
• Concept Differentiation (Distinguish one concept from another based on comparisons of similar and dissimilar attributes)
• Abstraction (Develop a superceding, generalized, simpler model, a de-construction, or partial exemplar of a concept by adding or removing selected rules or attributes)

The reason I mention this Hierarchy today is because I am experimenting with some Formulations and methods generated from Impressionistic methods that appear Abstract in appearance. It is an unintentional and unplanned effect to get into Abstract appearances. This Hierarchy model can help the Reader evaluate what they are looking at when seeing new art or evaluating an Artist with a different look and feel to their Artifacts -What attributes do you see? What do you focus on? What does it mean to you based on your experiences? What other things does it remind you of?  What would you call it?  How do you feel about it? How is it the same or different from other things you have seen or experienced? How far out beyond your own experience is it? This is new territory for me to be delving into Abstract Art but I have an objective in sight and reason for conducting these experiments.  More to follow, Dear Reader.