The Artistic Influences in Abstract Art Behind Simon Kenny’s Work

By Simon Kenny | 6 min read

My abstract art draws on three wells: cosmology, human psychology and a historical lineage of painters. The artistic influences in abstract art shaping my lyrical abstraction include J.M.W. Turner, Pablo Picasso and Albert Bierstadt, three painters who expanded what a landscape or a form could express long before abstraction existed as a movement.

My last post looked at the studio itself, the process, materials and music behind each painting. This one turns to where the ideas begin, before the first mark lands on canvas, and to the painters working across three centuries whose approach to light, form and scale still sit quietly behind my own lyrical abstraction.

How do cosmology and psychology feed into Simon Kenny’s abstract art?

Cosmology and psychology are the two conceptual currents running under my lyrical abstraction. The scale and energy of the universe supplies a vocabulary of light, motion and depth, while a long-standing interest in psychology shapes the emotional charge of each composition. Both themes are explored in full in an earlier post on the meaning behind the abstraction.

Rather than repeat that ground here, it is worth explaining why the two subjects sit together. Cosmology deals with vast, largely invisible forces: the birth of stars, the pull of gravity and deep time. Psychology deals with equally invisible forces closer to home: emotion, memory, the subconscious. Abstraction can register both without flattening either into illustration.

Claim: Psychological research links exposure to vast, awe inducing imagery, including scenes suggesting cosmic or natural scale, with measurable shifts in mood and a stronger sense of connection to others.
Source: American Psychological Association, accessed July 2026.

What are the artistic influences in abstract art behind Simon Kenny’s work?

The artistic influences in abstract art behind my lyrical abstraction are three painters: J.M.W. Turner, Pablo Picasso and Albert Bierstadt. Turner’s treatment of light, Picasso’s deconstruction of form and Bierstadt’s command of scale each shaped a different habit that carries through into my own canvases, decades before abstraction was named as a movement.

In the two decades I have spent developing lyrical abstraction since 2003, these three names recur most often when I am asked where the ideas for a new painting actually come from, more than any single technique or material.

J.M.W. Turner and the language of light

J.M.W. Turner (1775 to 1851) is the artist I return to most often. Turner’s late seascapes and storms dissolve solid form into light, weather and colour, pushing British landscape painting to the edge of abstraction more than a century before the term existed.

For me, the lesson is not the subject matter but the permission it grants: proof that atmosphere and feeling can carry a composition as convincingly as a recognisable scene. The sweeping, layered surfaces built up with palette knife and acrylic gel in my own lyrical abstraction owe a clear debt to that instinct.

Claim: Tate holds the Turner Bequest, comprising nearly 300 oil paintings and around 30,000 works on paper left to the nation after J.M.W. Turner’s death in 1851.
Source: Tate, accessed July 2026.

Pablo Picasso and the permission to deconstruct

Picasso’s break from single point perspective, developed alongside Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914, gave later generations of artists licence to break a subject into planes, gestures and fragments rather than render it whole, a genuine rupture in how painting worked.

I do not work in Cubist form, but the underlying permission, that a painting can prioritise structure and feeling over faithful likeness, sits behind every non-representational mark I make. It is a rebellious spirit as much as a technique, and one that has been a formative influence on my own willingness to abandon the recognisable image.

Claim: The Museum of Modern Art dates the beginning of Cubism to Picasso’s 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, developed alongside Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914.
Source: Museum of Modern Art, New York, accessed July 2026.

Albert Bierstadt and the scale of the sublime

Albert Bierstadt (1830 to 1902), a German American painter of the second-generation Hudson River School, built his reputation on monumental canvases of the American West, several metres wide, using light to heighten the sense of awe a landscape could produce.

That scale, and the belief that a painting can physically overwhelm a viewer the way a landscape might, resonates in my own large format work. Bierstadt was not painting the cosmos, but the effect he pursued, a viewer humbled by something far bigger than themselves, sits close to what I chase through cosmic and elemental imagery today.

A closer influence: Uria Monzon

Alongside these historical figures, I have a more personal influence, Uria Monzon, a family friend and practising artist whose own studio habits shaped my early understanding of what a working artist’s life actually involves. Where Turner, Picasso and Bierstadt shaped my eye, this closer relationship shaped my discipline: the unglamorous, repeated studio hours underneath any finished painting.

How do these influences show up in Simon Kenny’s studio today?

In practice, these influences rarely appear as direct references. Cosmology and psychology set the emotional and conceptual scale of a piece, while Turner, Picasso and Bierstadt inform decisions about light, structure and size once I am standing in front of the canvas.

The result is lyrical abstraction that tries to carry historical weight without illustrating any single source directly, built the same way it has been since 2003: in layers, by hand, with a palette knife rather than a brush for much of the heavier paint.

The full body of work sits somewhere on that same axis: between the vastness of the cosmos, the complexity of feeling and three centuries of painters testing how far a canvas can be pushed. Seeing several pieces together, rather than one in isolation, makes that lineage easier to trace. Explore the collection to see how it plays out.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did J.M.W. Turner influence the development of abstract art?

Turner is widely regarded as a forerunner of abstraction. His later work dissolved recognisable form into light, weather and colour, an approach that influenced generations of artists working towards pure abstraction, including the British lyrical abstraction tradition I work within today.

How did Picasso’s Cubism lead towards abstract art?

Cubism broke a single viewpoint into multiple fragmented planes, showing that a painting did not need to depict a subject accurately to hold meaning. That permission, structure and feeling over likeness, is a direct ancestor of later abstract movements, including lyrical abstraction.

Is Simon Kenny’s abstract art influenced by science as well as art history?

Yes. Alongside painters such as Turner, Picasso and Bierstadt, cosmology and psychology inform the emotional and conceptual scale of my work, discussed at greater length in a dedicated post on the psychology of abstract art.

A lineage, not a formula

None of these painters, or the science that sits alongside them, tell you what one of my paintings is about. Abstraction resists that kind of translation by design. What they explain is why the work looks the way it does, why light behaves as it does across a canvas, why scale matters, and why a composition can hold structure and feeling at once. Understanding that lineage does not replace looking at the paintings themselves, it simply gives the looking somewhere to start. To enquire about a commission or an original work, get in touch directly.