Abstract Art, "What's the meaning of this?"

I've been exploring my thoughts around abstract art and I've decided to begin sharing them in my blog in the hope of getting some exchanges that might shed some more light on the matter.
In my estimation any creative manifestation is the product of a process, . . . a journey.

What I mean by "journey" is this. It begins with a thought. The thought begins to swirl around in the artist's head and begins to take shape. More shapes and transformations of the thought are added to it as it becomes a "train of thought". After this sort of deliberation goes on for a while a conclusion is reached and the piece is concieved in the artist's mind. It might be completely different or even unrelated to the original thought but wouldn't exist without having been bourne of that original thought. That's a journey. We all experience them, artist or not.

Nowhere in art is this more apparent than in the realm of the abstract. I think it's because of the journey that we are in the least intrigued, (if we are), by a piece. And, actually, nothing could be more artistic than successfully expressing that journey as well as the destination in the final piece.

One of the things I have a hard time drinking in is a piece or an entire body of work by an artist who, quite obviously, never bothered to learn even the most basic tenets of art before they began. One could argue that proper perspective applied to a chair which is integral to the point of the piece is irrelevant and would even distract or alter the viewer's perception, but I haven't been convinced of that yet. (what's a day without at least one good rationale huh?) It seems to me a lazy or shortcut approach for an artist to skip over those tenets. Even if you learned them and discarded them in the creation of a piece, it would still be evident that you had them in your artistic toolbox.

Other pieces might seek simply to portray the mood of the artist when the piece was created, through color and form, etc. Not much wrong with that either, but to base an entire body of work on that process alone seems a little forced after a few pieces. In other words, after a few successful pieces in that vein the artist is stuck with nowhere new to go because they have no other tools for the exploration. (just my perspective to date. I'm willing to learn).