A Question Concerning Painting
When I read Merleau Ponty’s essay “Cezanne’s Doubt”, I began to formulate a question, a question concerning painting. I had been working through my own painting process, a way of determining what it was I was seeking out while I was painting, and the struggle of articulating my own ends or means or beliefs in the work I choose to do so fervently. It was during the passage where Cezanne is discussing with Emile Bernard, who asks “But aren’t nature and art different?” To which Cezanne replies “I want to make them the same. Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into painting”. To which Merleau Ponty extends further by writing: “[Cezanne] did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear; he wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization.” (MP, p63-64). Cezanne wanted his paintings to attempt “a piece of nature” because “everything comes to us from nature; we exist through it; nothing else is worth remembering.” This statement clarified the kind of process I myself was engaging with: the depiction of matter as it takes on form.
I was beginning to make paintings the way that the action painters would make paintings, throwing and splashing material onto canvases larger than my body, canvases laid out on the floor so that I could move about them, as in the way Rosenberg described them: “an arena in which to act.” It was a breakthrough in the thinking and the process of the making of the works, yet I have still to clearly articulate the links and affiliations, or perhaps the genealogy of this beginning. I will therefore use this writing as an attempt to flush out a phenomenology of my own personal, and often private, painting practice. I do not want to write an “artist statement” but maybe something more along the lines of an “artist question”, or a series of questions, that allow a framework for constructing the process that informs or guides the work. Like John Cage said “Don’t make structures, set processes going.” A process is something that goes on, a series of actions or operations, a structure is something that is arranged in a definite pattern, a coherent organization. I do not want to make structure paintings, but process paintings. Likewise, I do not want to make this writing a structured statement, but a process inquiry.
“Phenomenology can be practiced and identified as a manner or style of thinking” […] It is a matter of describing, not of explaining or analyzing” (MP, p10).
I should like to attempt an examination of the phenomenology of my painting practice, starting therefore with the “facticity” of its operations, essences, objects and images. There is the raw canvas, laid on the floor, a large one usually, about 6 feet by 8 feet in size. I gather materials and paints, brushes, rags, and choose the general color palette.
The four characteristics of phenomenology: 1. Describe the things-themselves 2. Isolate the Authenticity 3. Intention means Projection 4. Perception is a Movement
Painting-in-itself
Describing the Things-Themselves
(desription of the painting_