From Poetry to Painting

June 19, 2023

Painting, Poetry, and Science – birds, temples, and time

From poetry to painting: That is the direction of the moment. Previously I had a second consideration at what is likely not an ‘underpainting’ or “Second Sentence.” Let me clarify what this means in terms of living life or philosophical concerns.

Try not to plan over plans. Let it come and go. Set yourself up for surprise. Once you get used to that mode, try not to offend the runnings of common sense around and within you.

The matter concerns another painting made for “Head in the Clouds” which is a collection I found myself building of late. This painting features a birdish character. I hate it and yet have learned to respect whatever it is fundamentally. Why? Because the encounter is beyond egoistic ambition.

Depending on how one experiences time and space or - what one is open to consider - had this moment sent me a letter? The point of the question concerns art and how to live. It concerns poetry and painting.

What is the significance of inadvertently painting something you will eventually see? It is directly a matter of planning to have no plan. It is a genuine science which seeks the moment between thinking and thought. It shall be an ethics of seeming.

Thus inadvertence. First, it is not the case one will see everything at once or in succession. Second, we are dealing with seeing something which is then considered significant. This is a slight derangement which art may address. The beauty of seeing something significant or, what is closer to heart in this word ‘significant’, is the point. The question: ‘Could the world operate like this every day?’ seems insignificant. The world sits upon levels of everydayness.

Nonetheless, what does poetry teach us? First, we need to confirm poetics is all we have of poetry itself. Yet once more the link between thinking and thought must care for the desire to think and desire at large which reveals itself as objects to us.

A temple recently visited is a great example. That I found myself at a temple (which was also a surprise) I am already compelled to relate to marvels, wonders, and beauty. I am there for fancy and in the most banal way because I am among the sway of common sense – a tourist. If I push as hard as I may, I shall make fancy matter. I am not interested in economic criticism. Nor am I interested in feeling guilty. I make no excuse nor have any interest. I am just going with the flow.

As noted the underpainting of living life is paramount. The underpainting of life needs to be respected. Again, and I now insist, the underpainting offers a glimpse of genuine science if and only if we practice the imagination ethically.

If I said I hate one of my paintings it is equivalent to saying I hate this or that person or thing. In effect, that I hate what life has to offer. So I won’t destroy it. I won’t paint it recklessly nor shall I distort it with technical surgery. I’ll just add some titanium white.

Jokes aside the ethics of underpainting is linked to poetry, that is, content we determine to be poems. The significance is not precise resemblance. Thai Lanna Art is more than a melting pot. I am not overused by surprise. It is certainly not a matter of imitation. It is not a matter of abusing the confines of fancy to the point of exhaustion. I learned some time ago the easy way to enjoy life is not passivity. It is certainly not submission. It is not guilt. Self-consciousness is not individual. Try and give up. Consider what was meant by “Artificial Populations” and “Children without Numbers.” And yet, irrespective of pace, life is lived at high throttle when one lets go of the wheel.

Coleridge may have been the first to formulate the single principle of imagination in two ways. It is found as fancy that is, an arch of this principle imagination which is erroneously bound to common parameters: Space and time according to convention or language according to AI. Perhaps perniciously, language which is “open” yet based on AI means AI moves toward the underpainting of common language; it is ever-only grand fancy. If we consider its evolutionary peak, it is ever-only grand fancy which begins at the point of integration or invasion through the hinge of thinking and thought consciously conceived.

I said Coleridge had two ways which he did. And it was studied by other thinkers and poets; it is lived by all. The second way is in fact the only way and by degree could we claim there are many levels to the game. Nonetheless, our limits are real on this matter to the point that technologies are augmented and ethical frames shall shift.

The bird which I photographed was captured in the painting which I hated. Why was I feeling that way? In ethical considerations, I was making a choice I had yet to recognize in the fanciful dynamic I had come to face after the fact. This is should be called the ‘primacy’ of the imagination. It is stupendously backward.

Imitation is not the role of the painter regarding subject matter. Art concerns living and the quest to accommodate and welcome the harvest of a true subject. That means what is imitated regards a fundamental or, what is interestingly if not increasingly fundamental today.

Coleridge might suggest knowledge is indifferent to imagination. And here we are dealing with the rational and irrational modes which express the question of the bind between imagination and knowledge. We are further demarcated to subjective pigeon holes or personal knowledge. A knowing which has begun to appear as a threat in particular, as it binds closely with AI and such.

It comes to this, for now. Whatever art provides us it does so personally. For those who venture to the artist’s world do so not only for fancy yet, fancy is part of it, even for the artist. Imitation is education and fundamental to learning language. Yet expression is not an object of commerce. It cannot exist in the established concepts of the marketplace. As long as the market imitates its own rules and replicates the results, it shall linger and close off into automation. Automation is imitation of something more fundamental. For me it is always backwards to what matters most.

The open exists in the appropriate backwardness found in dedication and practice of the imagination. The open persists until the knowledge or material foundation has reached the peak of evolution. Fancy is not merely superficial, it is the conditioning of the open by common sense which itself evolves. We live in exciting times.   

April 21, 2023

On “Second Sentence”

To try to verify it, I went to the last small series of poems I had written last year. From “poetry to painting” this time seems “from painting to poetry.” For one serious reason. I don’t rely on technical names for style or approach. One has to get out of the way of style and simply be there when it moves through you. I suppose.

Yesterday I stretched two canvases on deep set frames. I finished off my canvas roll. Nothing was on my mind really, and I had exhausted the paced and measured detail mindset. But I was also unsure if I should start another painting because starting is often the most challenging.

Currently I have four work-in-progress paintings which are three too many. And then there are those which probably need this or that. But “Second Sentence” was too serious. Having the experience of a poem come true is something you never get used to or, come to expect; rely on and so forth. Yet there is this strangeness I love about it. In this painting I find it looking back at me in a very personal way.

Accidents (this painting is not intentional) seem the closest to unadulterated thinking I have yet to experience in painting. And I do not mean thought, not that dance about instances meant for neurotics – not about those hanging pictures of personal episteme.

So, did you see them? Do you see that dancing figure? Truth is I was smashing with correct energy in a way I have not done for over a year. I left that dance to learn something else about skill. Moving through the ‘hardest part’ concerns self-awareness, the barrier to a moment more real. And this is the point about painting. I was constantly interrupted by little things, all by myself – distracted and thankfully so. But there it was, looking at me in the freshness of wet paint. And I was unsure if they would stay.

Today I watched the paint dry. Like a happy fool.  

January 3, 2023

Heidegger, Stevens, poetics, aiart and the ethics of the imagination

The concept from poetry to painting is not a one-way passage. Insofar as something becomes historical poetry allows an exception regarding truth and a would-be final form. (The terms I deploy as a matter of criticism are those primarily of Wallace Stevens’s poetry of thought according to my scholarship.)

The distinction between poetry itself and poetics is oft conflated. In scholarship the concept of poetics has an unresolved and troubled past. Troubled because poetics becomes poetics itself rather than the consideration turning to poetry itself. This is one reason to oppose postmodern excesses. Another is the taint of financialization in terms of scholarship (a polemic here to avoid).

Nonetheless, a problematic distinction may be found near the conclusion of Martin Heidegger’s storied lecture The Origin of the Work of Art which states “the essence of art is poetry” and “the essence of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth.” For art to be truth, it is supposed by the essence of poetry which serves as its foundation for truth to be detected in art-things. The existence of art as a node of truth is preceded by the essence of poetry – not poetry itself. Poetry is therefore not truth rather labours for truth according to the Being of Heidegger’s philosophical enterprise.

This philosopher determines the function of poetry itself in a tripartite way “founding as bestowing, founding as grounding, and founding as beginning.” Founding as the essence of poetry means truth in terms of the world and history. World and history exist by the essence of poetry and not poetry itself. The truth is ever a paradox and therefore inconclusive.

A paradox because founding “is actual only in preserving” history and world. For Heidegger, truth is not absolute or fully realized potential. Founding functions to conceal and reveal hence poetry is actual “only in preserving” and remains at the level of essence and not itself. For Heidegger we know not poetry rather poetic relation and its functionality according to his philosophy.

This is why, for art “[t]ruth is un-truth, insofar as there belongs to it the reservoir of the not-yet-revealed, the un-covered, in the sense of concealment.” Furthermore “strife” provides a moment of the “open.” When the work is open Heidegger supposes “there must always be some being in this open region in which the openness takes its stand and attains its constancy.” He extends this to “the Greek sense of thesis, which means a setting up in the unconcealed.”

Openness as defined is “self-establishing ... in the open region” whereby “thinking touches on a sphere.” (From this Heidegger cites section 44 of Being and Time for further proof, albeit self-evident and inferenced of his own, abductively so.) In sum, Being has somehow permitted the being of some art-thing a clear space or “clearing of the There” so that “each being emerges in its own way.”

Paradoxically Heidegger seems to have no faith in what he calls truth, for such “does not exist itself beforehand” furthermore “truth is the opposition of clearing and concealing.” There is no cosmic truth, no absolute “somewhere among the stars” which would “subsequently ... descend everywhere among beings.” Conversely, Being has to be believed in by Heidegger. For the practice of narrating the activity of Being for beings also takes place in space and time as “[c]learing of openness and establishment in the open region belong together ... are the same single essence of the happening of truth” which is “historical in multiple ways.” This is an evidentiary element of Heidegger’s poetics as “[t]ruth happens only by establishing itself in the strife and the free space opened up by truth itself.”

Should truth itself be read analogously as poetry itself? Indeed, Heidegger does not use the term poetry itself rather assigns poetry to historical / world founding “bestowing, grounding, and beginning” as noted above. World as such is derived from Heidegger’s earth concept appropriated from the poetry of Hölderlin. Nevertheless, we shall avoid that digression. For now one may note conflations of nature and earth or, nature and world avoided.

By invocating the Greek concept of thésis, Heidegger seems to take a stand ‘opposed to nature, physis’. That is, setting up in the unconcealed is the position taken by Being for beings against nature or physis in the Greek sense. It is done for Being’s truth – whatever that is. Once more, “truth is the opposition of clearing and concealing.” This is his primary relation which is poetic because it suggests the how of truth. Truth uses its truth, itself, for Being. The question comes to Being as a true subject or simply subject matter. How authentic is the Being of Heidegger’s philosophy if it is subject to intention more than fortuity?

Let us recall thinking touches on a sphere which is a strange line. Let us consider the difference between thought and thinking. Thought is historical thinking just as consciousness is reflective of pure force. That thought takes places as reflection, revolving in the terrain or receptacle of consciousness, is by the how of thinking. After all, thinking touches from whom? Thinking touches for what?

Being is the after-thinking of dreaming. Being is a metaphor of the intelligence, nous. Being is the demand all dreams be held accountable to logic. To be deduced in terms of the causal. It means to institute a power over the imagination. And the question if not polemic emerges – for whom, for what, and by how?

This questioning concerns the object ‘sphere’ which thinking touches. Rhetorically, thinking touches down upon this object. Heidegger thinks. Conversely in the poetry of thought, thinking emerges from the object. The poem thinks as thoughts in the recorded word which never fully accounts. Could an intended conscious will discover thinking, by seeking the subject named Being? It must occur without intent if it is to be the true subject. Conversely, to apprehend the how means to think upon it historically which is self-consuming and despairing. To force it into an explanation which is the disposition of the philosopher. The end result would be full historicization of thinking by virtue of thoughts.

From the perspective of a poetry of thought the distinction between the essence of poetry and poetry itself needs clarified. For Heidegger’s essence of poetry is the inductive basis of the historical world and various truths. This world and its essential truths are premised on the existence of the world. Things and human existence comprise the world factically. Conversely, the poetry of thought holds poetry itself a single principle differentiated in the world. Yet the world is only a part.

Poetry does not exhaust itself in the world. Poetic relation is relation at large and concerns every relation. That means poetry itself is greater than any world which cannot or does not know beyond poetics.

Thus when I say poetry itself is reduced to poetics I do not mean merely, for this concept has gained in sophistication since the time of Aristotle. And it is implied in the actual / potential use by Heidegger which continues the legacy of Aristotelian sophistication. And yet we are dealing with a difference between the world and the absolute; a world sophisticated by a force and the attempt to perfect it formally.

This shall complicate the distinction between earth and world which is a central part of Heidegger’s lecture. That is, the essence of poetry invites measuring or its own irreconcilable measurement which engenders more than generates feeling. Let us consider if it’s a depletion or distancing from potency in a provisional way.

Essence seems a consequence of the original division or differentiation which supposes any accounting as history. This is why poetics means an irreconcilable relation between things. Where relation is conclusively resolved one shall no longer have a world or perceive it so. The exception to this is once more, feeling. Feeling is the province of poetry itself and perhaps only one.

Feeling is not sentiment any more than the earth is the world. Existence is not present to itself without historical structuring. In sum, existence is ever only seen from existents as taught to us by Fernando Pessoa. 

In general poetics concerns induction, deduction, and abduction or why it is not irrational or alogical more than it is rational and logical for the world. If in want of universal consistency from beginning to end, poetic feeling demands deduction. Yet I do not think there is much space for poetics by successful deduction. Conversely, deductive poetics may be viewed as a guard function of poetry itself. This is the how of truth for Heidegger. Therefore, truth for Heidegger is not the Being of philosophy which enthrals poetry. It means poetry itself or the absolute object of Kierkegaard, Wahl, and Stevens.

Under the pressure of contrary evidence and faltering universality, induction favours poetics in terms of probability. Such concerns inferences or traces of truth as novel and factual. It is highly probable but not entirely deduced. Probability keeps a space for poetics and in such, the vestiges of feeling.

If it is abductive the syllogistic rule still applies however, poetics has two subordinate relations as abduction. Whatever is evident services the starting premise (deduced as far as it can be) which is irresolvable to the extent that a second ‘minor’ premise emerges as probabilistic in kind.

Within the abductive, the world form of logic and reasoning creates or engenders its own poetics of an original generative event – or so this writer surmises. For abduction places stress on what is known with deference to the unknown utilizing both deduction and induction. One could say abduction is a most poetic logical syllogism of a highly synthetic nature.

This is another way to say AI finds its limit at sentiment. For AI takes a stand against nature and physis by way of a formal thesis ‘if-then’. Such a thesis is deductive in the end, having achieved its deduction from induction and abduction. Only in its sophistication shall it exceed predications of human intention, that is, our desire for subject matter and not the true subject. At that point, a point we are ever nearer, the true subject seems to have been achieved by AI. The ethical situation for the imagination is ever greater.

What then becomes of art? Why create art and how? Poetry does not require intention. The true subject is fortuitous and occurs to one only in reflection. Where it sets about us, it cannot be forced. How to force a force? We are indeed historical, ethically we abide by force. Yet the painting which appears in front of me, unfinished, holds many forms in its form. And I find pleasure in crafting them. I paint only for enjoyment of living life.

The poem is not forced because it is beyond us. And in that it saves us from pure deduction rather reduction and then extinction. Indeed, there is no problem with progress and technology however, we are still human and must affirm what that is amongst every change, seismic or otherwise.  

December 12, 2022

Dreams – What goes into a painting “Waking Up at Night?”

Contradiction to me concerns power. If power is signified force, in the most general sense, it is analogous to drive and act in psychology or, rhetoric and policy for politics. In poetry the relation between dreams of sleep and dreams of waking concerns imaginative force. The difference is potential and action which may culminate in the creation of an expressive object or thing.

Painting concerns an eidetic thing which is always about power. A blazon wants our attention while diverting us from the problem of its source which is, the one who looks at it. Power’s central contradiction is form and content. Painting shares this with poetry and it is particular to the concept of truth – the true subject and the subject matter of the thing ‘there’. Where one wants to paint a particular scene or event, subject matter dominates or is the only thing considered relevant. This is why academics and critics determine art to be illusion. The same is said of poetry. This contradiction itself promotes illusion in the interest of determining what is powerful. It does so from afar.

This means powerful art has been construed in terms of the political, in general. Most will ignore the very complex if not impossible answer to thinking such through. Today’s powerful art means to impress upon us AI art is art. Yet it does not require one ever learn to be a painter. Just like the eater of meat never butchered a chicken or harvested their own food. Much like students need not read books to write their essays.

Today we are more concerned with subject matter and not the truth of it. Simply put, power at its extreme lacks appealing force. This is another way of saying I prefer natural cheese over processed ones. Yet there is a denaturation going on here, a desiccation of creative and divergent thought. The core of this thought is thinking and feeling itself.

In a current painting there are two situations I am dealing with. It is a matter of method that I do not intend it and all intended paintings looks quite anaemic to me before I start them. What I mean to say is that painting requires less conscious reflection and therefore, it is less prone to encourage pathological living.

What goes into a painting is familiar and then morphic meaning, one has to observe the passage in time and space. That is empowering, not however a matter of power.

September 26, 2022

Drive - DLM

Something to consider is the difference between motivation and drive. Another is the difference between inspiration and aspiration. It is, in the end, a matter of respiration. Because that is true one has to mind the word respite.

Here we are dealing with irreducibles for which there cannot be any permanent respite. Rest however is a means for moving; it is drive in a particular state or phase. Rest is the transformed state of being driven.

Inspiration means to breathe in. And one breathes in what another breathes out. When one inspires another they breathe in to from without. Aspiration means desire. To aspirate means to inhale but equally to blow out and breathe ‘on something’.

Drive pervades it all. If one inspires another they do so by drive and not intent. The expressed drive of another is impressive and it may motivate. Yet the artist “is driven” before they are an artist or poet or friend and so on.

Painting is about nothing more than drive. You don’t matter – just the thing there. The painting itself and you. All the dimensions and puzzles. What was seeping out in the morphemes while one was in the act of the drive? The overflow of the drive is a glimpse at thinking. This is what the substrate details in that most intimate way – to the very point of the spiration or movement of the brush.

Motivation is nothing compared to drive. It is ego-level. Not everyone is motivated but all are driven. This is obvious if one gets out of the way of themselves, that is, the way they think of themselves is dropped from the way in which they are driven.

Aspiration and inspiration are exhumed on to the substrate. The painter knows this, the poem guards drive from logic.

September 12, 2022

Time cont.

If I began the last entry with poetry and confusion ‘written poetry confuses many’ it was an illustration ipso facto. And for that, I should reverse the order of my entries which is, itself, a second illustration of time and the movement of truth in regard to art. To a poet such things are obvious. And this is not lost on the painter. And with that I study propaganda in perhaps a fundamental way. This may digress into a tiresome ethics, so I shall avoid it.

I had come to this thinking for a few reasons. Timeliness: when people or things appear with the dint of order which seems perfect. At any given time humans are seemingly arranged and sometimes this becomes legible. It’s not magic but it can be mystifying but we don’t need to indulge and intend it.

I was discussing a poem by Wallace Stevens “Human Arrangement” and my recent conversation with an intellect prompted some of this writing. Here is the poem:

Place-bound and time-bound in evening rain

And bound by a sound which does not change,

Except that it begins and ends,

Begins again and ends again-

Rain without change within or from

Without. In this place and in this time

And in this sound, which do not change,

In which the rain is all one thing,

In the sky, an imagined, wooden chair

Is the clear-point of an edifice,

Forced up from nothing, evening's chair,

Blue-strutted curule, true-unreal,

The center of transformations that

Transform for transformation's self,

In a glitter that is a life, a gold

That is a being, a will, a fate.

In this poem there are illustrations which bring about degrees of legibility. As the explicitly of the illustration grows mid-poem to the apex of a wooden chair, we are bound to forget the rhythm and prone to ignore sound. Sound here is not only reading out-loud rather, the soundness of a poem. Moreover, one cannot audibly read a painting. The sound of a painting conforms to the rhythm of its stroke and tones; subjects, etc., but such does not necessarily mean soundness.

Next is the analytical part of it all, or a partial consideration. Place and time “bound” concerns “sound” which “does not change”. Precisely then “in this sound, which do not change” is not a typo. The difference between does and do is significant. In painting this concerns balance or symmetry which must also express the truth of such in regard to a sound imbalance and asymmetry. It concerns intent in the fabric of time which expresses itself in the space of the substrate.

Soundness reveals the strength of an artificer. And the observer is also part of this arrangement. There is more to say but no need to go further.

September 12, 2022

Time

Written poetry confuses many. A poet comes to accept the experience they call poetry and wield their medium to express it. As a painter the use of paint is as the use of writing. Eventually one comes to build such with this intent. Thus the approach becomes a potential problem or more an illustration. It’s not that illustration is unwise. But that and other components of poetry become too close to intent.  

To write poetry or paint one needs to be perpetually available. To paint means to be in the studio even if they don’t want to paint. Yet that is not where ‘life’ takes place, that is, the experience of the studio itself matters less – please watch the mess – applies.

If I intend to be in the studio I do not intend to paint. I reject the reasoning of why I am there to begin with. Such treatment of time goes misunderstood. A painter or poet may create something rather quickly and some may question the value of that. Others may deify them. Both are extreme and banal. It’s a matter of skill and, moreover, humanity.

Time is not money yet we are still pressed by this common sense. A painter or poet has to get time right which means something other than contemporaneity. But they should also consider how to use intent and illustration when they have (what seems to be) no way out of it. Using this well means time matters less. One returns to fishing.

Political art therefore is two things. First, that time is greater than money (they are not equals) and that the imagination is greater than both; so one must learn to use it. Second, intent can slip underneath our sense of time and in the breaking of time to common sense, the intent reveals itself as something else.

Otherwise or without this indicates a lack of meditation or prison of the contemporaneous. And that is why political art is both possible and fraudulent. With that said, this whole thing may well concern a third.  If one illustrates feeling it is usually an intention. It gains power at the expense of expressing imaginative force. Why? Because politics is feeling-as-reaction; it cannot be delineated with greater authenticity after the point of an appearance. Why? Because we are conscious of it meaning, feeling seems to be first. Yet what sets that in motion to the self is already moved away by virtue of time. Propaganda therefore concerns the movement of truth within time. For that it is less alive. If one wants to be analytical, simply study the technique or policy. There is an artist in all that too. Feeling is first when time matters less. Time names truer feeling ‘emotion’. But that is merely a name for the past which dominates our attention.

September 7, 2022

Improvisation - aiart

In Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life, I was pleased to have found a maxim. It was something of a clarification regarding artificial intelligence and art. Writes Baudelaire from an “a priori reasoning”

“The perpetual correlation between what is called the soul and what is called the body is a quite satisfactory explanation of how what is material or emanates from the spiritual reflects and will always reflect the spiritual force it derives from.”

AI art or maybe ‘aiart’ comes during a realignment of sorts, globally – the crises of nationalism of late and the supposed faltering, world-system. This is noted as Baudelaire was remarking on national art and gestures:

“In a unity we call a nation, the professions, the social classes, the successive centuries, introduce variety not only in gestures and manners, but also in the general outlines of faces. Such and such a nose, mouth, forehead, will be standard for a given interval of time, the length of which I shall not claim to determine here, but which may certainly be a matter of calculation.”

The national configuration of what one looks like is a matter of historical categorization. And B’s rhetorical tone is skeptical in terms of a ‘unity’. Nonetheless such categorization is canonical and fixing, historicism perfects the past and directs the present to an open (albeit of prescribed margins). It does so on the evidences of say, spiritual-residue, but does it align with the ambit of an initial if not superior force - soul? (Would not the true body of the spirit be such?)

Thus when aiart cut into our attention in 2018, namely the sale of one Portrait of Edmond Belamy, we find a spiritual-material prevailing over soul. That is, spiritual-residue, the supposed haunted history of gestures seems new. It seem to guard us from its source. Contrarily the source is simply the code.

Of course I work from Baudelaire’s criterion which belongs to a poetry of thought. Thus with aiart we deal with reflections of spirit which is tacitly ‘mind’. What then of B’s soulful emanation? In consideration of dimension zero (as previously considered) mind-reflection concerns “inferior imaginative power.” Aiart is that and that alone. But this does not mean we not consider it otherwise. Great miscalculations have led to extinction in the past, according to the past which is one without a soul, rather matters of spirit in the codicils of history.

Imagination as power is not the same as force. Poetry teaches us the distinction between sentiment and feeling. In certain works we encounter a reflective engendering of mental activity, of the symbolic which is attached to form but, as Focillon noted, is an “unnecessary addition.” This is, in one sense, a guarding. Form and soul share a tether and technical destiny proves an augur into zero.  

One final consideration. The source is a code for spirit, hence spiritual-residue. But it is not soul rather, a reflection of our desubjectification. Are we able to re-establish this tether by seeking zero though the complicated presentation of the past? At the moment I think no. Improvisation says otherwise.

September 5, 2022

Perspective

I have been a reader of Henri Focillon’s The Life of Forms in Art (1934) for several years. It’s well written as opposed to certain books by non-artist. It is not that critics and philosophers should (or not) write what they wish however, they should have at least “picked up a brush” to quote a friend. Focillon had.

Perspective in art concerns seeing the world as composition. And it’s true. Once you focus on perspective for some time (in terms of a plan for your composition) you may end up looking at the world that way. There is a limit to this seeing which concerns poetics. And by poetics I mean a discernible, felt relation between something congruent but not fixed at any point. Ultimately it is this sensibility which concerns poetry and painting.

I picked up Focillon’s text recently as I was queried by a recent acquaintance I had made – a rare thing for me these days is to meet another academic, moreover one who is an intellectual which seems an additional rarity. He had asked me to consider his remarks on Camille Pissarro’s Rue Saint-Honoré in the Afternoon. So I turned to Focillon.

In Pissarro’s Rue one sees Paris in one sense, eternally. However, this particular work concerns rain which I assume Pissarro’s halftone. Says Focillon:

“The painter of halftones, again, turns to the rain and the fog which serve to harmonize his values: before him is a curtain of water, and he sees everything through it”

Altogether this is another type of perspective than common cant. It is poetical. Why? Because seeing everything through a “curtain of water” is both fog and rain. Our eyes are moist, etc. Focillon also says of the matter:

“Behind and beyond the sign's material aspect, of a signifying aspect: clouds announce rain, a portrait refers to a model, the sign transmits signification, the symbol gives rise to a signified that cannot be apprehended directly by thought.”

Poetics here concerns the painting’s subject matter or the relation between model and portrait. For all the talk today concerning eleven dimensions, in painting we are dealing with say, casual naturalism. Such brings us to poetry. At the center of poetry we are always dealing with dimension zero. With poetics we are dealing with the irreducible of two things of which its source is zero. This is what “cannot be apprehended directly by thought.”

Therefore what we are dealing with is the verb of thought or what I consider thinking. The relationship between thinking and thought is the ultimate poetic. Thus it may be easier to understand why a “curtain of water" is poetry. Once more, because it comes together by virtue of two things according to conventional perception.

It concerns ‘the mind’ and art. I find it pleasurable to consider the zero sum of fog and rain as antithetical to Focillon’s “curtain of water” and this is what I mean when saying “from poetry to panting” that is, the perspective of poetry to painting.

Yet such a statement sounds simple compared to Focillon:

“Artistic form is not, however, index, sign, icon or symbol; it can become any of these things, perhaps even unceasingly is, but signification is joined to form as an unnecessary addition. Being symbolic animals, human beings lend signification to everything around them and, above all, to the products of their own activity. But in the case of the artistic work, which is form, symbolization is constituted in a nonconceptual mode, because it is in relation to the activity of the subject, an activity of perception or of fabrication. The meaning of form is above all the rhythm of the body, the movement of the hand, the curve of the gesture.”

Here Focillon remarks of our zero dimension in relation to the technology that is body. Artistic form is what puts into relation model and portrait. This form is imbued with something unintelligible but does not preclude the intelligence (which less common cant calls an eleventh dimension). The body is in the work rather, it is the no-body of any work.

One supposes the supreme value of art means to ponder Walter Benjamin’s aura of the work. Another, to practice art is healthy. Indeed. Yet there is a disquieting element of Focillon’s brilliance that concerns technical destiny. Fine art reveals an intelligence unearthed. The quality of the work is its ability to show something we all possess in relation to a zero sum dimension. And the quality of the artist concerns the degree to which they manifest nothing. But it is not magic.

Focillon’s account appraises the hand. One supposes the hand and its entirety is known to works of art, eventually. Today artificial intelligence is composing art works which fascinate us. I need not name any as soon there will be too many. And certainly I am not talking about NFT’s of originals nor am I posturing as a Luddite.

My thinking concerns the human’s place between technology and destiny. If these two are poetical we need to get an understanding how to use the zero it expresses at us and within us. It may be the rhetorical appeal of AI art implicates an intelligence which we do not possess. This could be a fatal if not firstly feeble positioning. We have already experienced this in politics.

People should paint and cultivate feeling-sensibility. I for one am tired of the lingering zeitgeist to chase technology, for speed concerns the fifth dimension which takes its tense from zero. Enough about ethics, what have we learned? Perspective in painting is far beyond space, width, and height. If we know three dimensions concern objects with a non-zero volume, we now know this is untrue in fine art. And if this is true in fine art it follows it is untrue for everything we discern an object of reality.

September 1, 2022

Details

What does it mean to paint details? Before I returned to visual art I had a strength in detail. There is a particular energy to it. I can only speak for myself. The energy is ambition and the drive to manifest an image of reality but ever only ‘as’. And here is a parody of reality ‘as if’. Baudelaire made this clear – why paint reality? Realism seeks to prove and is desirous of a closing and completing; merging perhaps reality with the world.

Do we ever live in a real world? I assume this notion is always with a scientist and their bind is tough. Facts are ‘stupid things’ in the end, shards of reality. Information is the detailing of life by shards of the factual. Could we compose a reality with all this noise?  

This approaches an aesthetic thinking. And in the contemplation of poetry to painting there are certain maxims I need to confront. Impressionism seems settled by the fact of its definition – the Académie des Beaux-Arts wins. Imperial by default. Information is an impression of both the world and reality – but for whom. If Impressionism frees up what a subject sees and has implications for the gaze – that one could see reality in this way – the polemic is not to reside there.

But I was writing about details. Details in painting are revealed after a less conscious, non-hesitative affirmation to engage. That is about it. But then in the residue or morpheme of the thing, are adumbrations to exhume further. What are we detailing then? How to care in the same affirmative sense, with a lack of hesitation? For now detailing is a process of confronting realism and the biases I have accumulated.

September 1, 2022

Solitude

Painting is solitary. One does not realize the extent of it until they commit to it. But it does not begin alone and this is a link to poetry in general. By alone I do mean solitary but of a different valence which is to say: the subjective-objective-object itself and, in whatever way that occasions a spin-off. Yes. Spin off can be linked to the pressure and stroke execution. I suggest painting large first to understand body-fire.

There is also the solitude of sitting with it. Rothko is known for this and is part of his marketing today. But this is not something exclusive to him and that is the point. One cannot sit with a poem when it is on the page in the way one sits with a painting. Both change when we are present with them; the spin-off at work still.

One cannot sit with a poem in the same sense because visually it is not there. The ‘sensorium’ is guarded in a supreme way by poetry first. In the mind contact is only relegated to the pristine point of abstract flight; thought near taciturnity. It shows us the strength of technological minimality, its mastery and advice is taciturn. The painting is a weaker form of this but by its exhibition tells us, aids us, in a way poetry does not readily provide. We are reminded then of the extension of the body by the object made. The poem does not provide it and seems stoic. This is protection. But I have always felt more was at stake in writing.