Tempered Mood

A patchwork of rich blues and violets, Michael Yurick’s Tempered Mood describes one of the most appropriate subjects for abstraction: emotion. While, ironically, certain forms of abstract painting (namely minimalism and geometric abstraction) are perhaps the only artworks that avoid emotion, abstraction is the natural aesthetic outlet for sentiment. Emotion has an indirect visual manifestation in the faces and movements of people under its sway, but it is an inherently intangible phenomenon. And what better way to describe the intangible than abstraction? We can see the effects of emotion, but, at its essence, we feel it. The feelings of others inspire those of our own. Whether it is love, hate, loneliness, happiness, or misery, emotion is cooperative and based on communication (or the lack thereof). Art is a means for us to understand the emotions of others and, by doing so, better understand ourselves.