Many of us have walked round art galleries and wondered what those abstract works are all about. They have been with us for a hundred years but retain their power to puzzle and perplex. Paul Crowther – Professor of Philosophy at NUI Galway – has offered solutions to the puzzle. In the three books he has published since arriving at Galway in 2009, abstract art has been a central research interest for him. He has now co-edited and contributed chapters to an important collection of essays dedicated to the problem. The work is Meanings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory which has just been published in the prestigious Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies series. Crowther and his co-editor Isabel Wunsche bring together scholars of international distinction, so as to focus on the major source of abstraction – nature. They are guided by the famous abstractionist Jackson Pollock’s remark ‘I am nature’. Pollock thought that action painting allowed abstract works to express symbols and ideas from the unconscious mind. Other abstract artists have different interests – and the book explores some of the most important of these. Professor Crowther’s own two chapters emphasize that – whatever the individual artist’s intentions – abstract works all involve optical illusion. This gives them the power to suggest such things as alien or unfamiliar perceptual environments, objects seen from unusual angles or under conditions of magnification or distortion. Ordinary pictures represent recognizable things, but abstract works allude to aspects of the visual field that are usually unnoticed or not accessible to ordinary vision.The book is the first publication from an international network of scholars working on abstract art. Professor Crowther will be working to build up this network, and to further internationalize his research in the coming year through sustained work on abstract art in major European and American collections.