Sensuous Intention and Painterly Practice: How Materials Influence Art
In his essay ‘Intentionality and Aesthetics’ Mikel Dufrenne writes that aesthetic perception ‘seeks the truth of the object such as it is immediately given in the sensuous.’[1] There is a relationship formed between object and viewer – a giving over of oneself to the appearance of the object in its reality. Transcendence is categorised as this giving over or union between the two – an illumination or revelation whereby our aesthetic perception is only that, uninfluenced by imagination or understanding, each of which attempt to impose a different relation. He claims that the action is responsible for a suspension of belief in the world around us and in fact leads us to a world of the object whereby it is ‘immanent in its appearance to the extent that this appearance is expressive.’[2] The ‘holding’ of our perception – that which ties and links us to the object, combined with the reduction of imaginative/apprehensive perception of the object means that is becomes real in the sensuousness of itself. He writes:
‘Thus the aesthetic object is perceived as real without referring to the real, to a cause for its appearing that is, to painting as a canvas, music as a sound of instruments ... The aesthetic object is nothing more than the sensuous in all its glory, whose form, ordering it, manifests plenitude and necessity, and which carries within itself and immediately reveals the meaning which animates it.’[3]
The immediacy of the subject/object relationship leads to its singleness. It is dependent on a viewer to testify to its being in the word by a mode of sense perception rather than comprehension. Before stating ‘what is this’ or ‘this is what it is’ I rather say ‘I see it, it is here.’ Dufrenne positions the viewer not only as witness but also as agent whose interrelation and reaction not only confirms the work but in fact completes it. The action of completion in turn attests to the process by which the object was made. The object, deposed as a manifestation of the sensuous, exhibits the intentionality of the creator. He explains this affective quality of the aesthetic object stating that they constitute specific a priori whereby something of the object must be present in the subject prior to all experience. In turn, something of the subject relates to the structure by which the object is presented prior to perception. This knowing – connaître, results in new knowing – reciprocity Dufrenne defines as ‘mutual birth’ – co-naître. He explains:
‘This conception of the a priori clarifies intentionality. By explicating the affinity of the subject and object, it cautions against both the naturalism that conceives of the subject as a product of the world, since the subject is capable of anticipating the world, and against the idealism that conceives of the world as a product of the subject, since the object carries meaning in itself.’[4]
Richard Wollheim also seeks to investigate modes of intention and artistic practice to address the character of painting – the finished products of artistic activity. He too utilises the word ‘agent’ but in this instance it is attributed to the artist whose intention, he claims, work separately to standard histories or traditions. If executed correctly, the products of artistic agency will have great effect upon the viewer – ones that will reveal the intentionality of the work and the artist themselves. He denies the standard determinants for meaning instead drawing from a psychological analysis to account for the effects of the activity of painting. He writes:
‘The marked surface must be the conduit along which the mental state of the artist makes itself felt within the mind of the spectator if the result is to be that the spectator grasps the meaning of the picture.’[5]
In ‘Painting as an Art’ Wollheim discusses intentionality under the headings of ‘style’ and ‘UR-Painting’ (Ur meaning Origin). Style, he states, has a ‘psychological reality’ – he equates it to language in the sense that one can know a language but they can have a style. One’s individual style affects the artist or ‘agent’ on a deep psychological level. It is a more profound vehicle than language due to its innate explanatory power. Style has until now been a tool of classification – a determining of characteristics and distinctive qualities, Baroque, for example. Wollheim however, wishes to examine it as a type of ‘thematization.’ Style incorporates the ‘minute aspects’ of the artist’s mark – the generation of stains and lines which lead to a distinctive set of processes by which they work. There is an assimilation of various media to produce meaning. It is the ‘banking’ of these processes that lead to an artist’s style. He likens this to a personality – something ‘immutably fixed’ which fulfil the artists intention at a constant visual point.
Ur-Painting then, he calls ‘the development of an activity that isn’t painting but it like it.’[6] (p.18) It is the action of the positing of marks upon a flat surface which leads to an evocation of new attention and positioning. The agent makes a mark – this in turn becomes relative in its relation to the edge of that marked surface. The agent becomes influenced by this contrast and places another mark, which in turn, becomes correspondent to edge, surface and previous mark. We see a relationship form between mark, surface and edge and the beginning of a negotiation of the factors. There is a dimensional aspect to the surface now with two becoming three – a sense of being able to ‘see in’ and ‘through’ the surface. This ‘seeing-in’ or ‘two-foldness’ will now influence the way the painter works. A construction of motif may occur – this action mirroring the previously mentioned ‘banking’ of process culminating in an inherent artistic style.
He concludes that if we are to understand when painting is an art we must return to the perspective of the artist, starting from their position as creator. While works of art can, to a point, have social functions, this role does not inform our curiosity as to the meaning of the work and the artist’s will. We must reconsider the spectatorial role – where Dufrenne speaks of the agent as spectator ‘completing’ the work of art, Wollheim suggests that the artist works as agent and spectator of their own work in processing a piece. He states:
‘Inside each artist is a spectator upon whom the artist, the artist as agent, is dependent. And this dependence is enshrined in what is one of the few constancies in the history of pictorial art: that is, the artist’s posture, or that, in the act of painting, he positions himself in front of the support, on the side of it that he is about to mark, facing it, with his eyes open and fixed upon it.’[7]
He places the act of painting and the resultant works back in the realm of painterly vision. He exalts the artist’s eye and posture with these factors shaping the very physical elements of artistic intention. While the spectator’s encounter of a painting must coincide with the artist’s vision for the considered experience of the work, Wollheim writes that it does not have to do so solely ‘through knowledge of it.’ Rather, he writes:
‘The artist’s intention ... should not be understood narrowly. It is not enough for the artist to set himself to mark the canvas with the mere aim that the spectator should see it in a certain way or as having these rather than those projective memories. Intention must be understood so as to include thoughts, beliefs, memories, and, in particular, emotions and feelings, that the artist had and that, specifically, caused him to paint as he did.’[8]
By looking at the aesthetic philosophy of Dufrenne and Wollheim we can identify common themes on the nature of painting. There are clear, direct references to the importance of artistic intention – the sensuousness of the object in and of itself, the subject/object or spectator/painting relationship and the role of agent – both as witness to complete the work and as artistic spectator of one’s own vision. Crucially, Wollheim makes distinction and reveals the importance of the physical requisites for creating a work – the artist’s eye and posture, with each contributing essential activity to the process by which a painting is made. Each of these philosophers demonstrate the importance of intention and methodology in our understanding of the finished work, however there is another facet to consider when we ask questions of aesthetic perception and experience. This is the notion of productive render-ment. To render something is a causal act – to cause something to be or become, to portray or produce. It is the bringing into space some form of being that was not there before. It is a transitive action – one that requires an object to receive activity, in this instance a designated surface or area upon which material is deposited to create forms and imagery. It we are to cede to the notion of artistic intention and process in order to categorically define important factors of the resulting painted element then it is also vital that we consider what Wollheim calls the ‘inert material’ by which they were made.
Let us refer to the following images. The first slide (Fig. 1) depicts the American artist Jackson Pollock constructing one of his famous drip paintings in 1949. Photographed for Life magazine, the images portray Pollock as a ‘virile, hard-drinking Macho man’ at work creating the pieces. The publication of the photographs in no small part contributed to Pollock’s reputation as a great painter, prompting the question in 1950 ‘is this the world’s greatest living artist?’ The photograph shows him kneeling on the edge of the canvas, perched resolutely, frowning and reaching directly into the centre. In his hand he cradles a tin of paint. There are a build-up of such tins to his left, paint-dripped, open, some containing brushes, awaiting use. There are several different tones on display on the canvas ground, each indicating a different colour or material used. Pollock holds a long, smothered brush, consumed with glots of paint that drip and run onto the canvas. There is no break in the liquid run-off, we can see directly the line of medium as it spatters form, traversing a looping conduit from canvas to brush and brush to artist. Of his ‘action’ painting Crowther writes:
‘Pollock’s optical-planar evocation of process means that both the transient individual dimension and the constancy of process, per se, are made complementary, and are, thence, expressed with a directness that eludes more figurative modes of representation.’[9]
The next image depicts Pollock as a more considered painter. (Fig.2) Still perched at the side of the floored canvas, this time he rests on both haunches, again frowning but with brush tilted and angled upwards, measuring the paint-flow, slowing it to delay the intensity. The dense black tone of the medium stands in contrast to the light-infused ground of the canvas. His stance betrays a more constructive methodology whereby the paint still flows but with a greater degree of control. The dripping run-off is slightly depleted, pooling instead in a dense organic looking form at Pollock’s centre. In figure three, (Fig.3) still with canvas on the horizontal, he leans quite heavily over the painting, can held as a bucket with brush in the process of flicking. The sudden fitful vibrations of paint betray the action of the piece – brief motion fuelled applications of media that criss-cross a designated canvas area. These are exercises in mark making, the generation of flicks and spatters to create form. The canvas ground serves as a type of inertia – a foil to the thick heavy splashes and agitation of the applied paint.
We have a different kind of aesthetic experience when we now look at a painting by Pollock, having witnessed the moment of inception. However, the images depict much more than just the artist at work. They clearly show an artist focussed on the materiality and medium as much as the process by which he makes a piece. Michael Leja writes of Pollock: ‘fluid and elegant poured lines generate a viscous and turbulent surface, encrusting studio detritus such as nails, cigarettes and paint tube caps.’[10] Indeed a work from 1947, Full Fathom Five, (Fig.4) is considered an ‘oil’ painting. However, the media listed include nails, tacks, buttons, keys, coins, cigarettes, matches etc. He also painted works using enamel, acrylic and gouache and used sand to occupy thick gritty slabs. The ‘dasein’ of materials do as much to influence the process by which a painting is made as artistic conception. The painter-object process can be constructed through a deftness and clarity of mark that has as much to do with how sharp a pencil is pared, how lubricated the paint is or how quickly an acrylic ground dries, as artistic concepts and ideas. Artist’s painterly media are relegated to a mention on the museum information card – as important to note as the title and date and yet forgotten frequently when it comes to discussing vision, concepts, movements and objects.
If we are to consider Pollock’s action paintings with regards to Wollheim’s concept of intentionality we are reminded that we must include ‘thoughts, beliefs, memories and feelings’ in our appraisal, to fully understand when painting is an art. In the case of Pollock we are enveloped in the sensuousness of an object created as part of a process that now exists in and of itself. The paintings offer no consolation in the way of recognisable imagery. They project not even a void, serving instead to demonstrate the lush, painterly process by which Pollock worked. We see a building of motifs, as recounted by Wollheim – the banking of processes that lead to an artistic style. These are not motifs that are visually recognisable but instead testify to methodology. Described as labyrinthine by some, Parker Tyler writes:
‘What are his dense and spangled works but the viscera of an endless non-being of the universe? Something which cannot be recognised as part of the universe is made to represent the universe in the totality of being. So we reach the truly final paradox of these paintings: being in non-being.’
Canvas Preparation
1. Artists do not buy canvases, we build them, stretch them, treat them, prime them
2. They have to be stretched/pulled in a certain way, otherwise the canvas will warp or dent, the frame will buckle etc. This extremely hard on the hands and body, burns hands etc. Very time consuming
3. When we are creating an artwork in this way we are designating a space – the artist is creating a point/area to deposit theory – we talk of space occupancy and being - a thing ‘in and of itself’ but we ignore this process, the point of designation for rendering is very important and considered much more than we believe
Let us consider the notion of canvas. It is the physical enduring surface upon which paint is applied in order to render image or form. While some artists paint on boards, on walls or primed fabriano paper (watercolourists for example), the application of oil paint is generally reserved for the canvas surface – the tensile weave that bounces back swathes of oily pigment. Canvases are subject to much abuse. Firstly, there is the construction of a wooden frame that must be reinforced and bolstered at the corners and centre upon which a heavy canvas cloth is stretched and stapled into place. This cloth may then be primed with a surface paint that dries and solidifies priming and smoothing the area. It may also be painted with size; a strong-smelling rabbit-skin glue that is heated to varnish and stretch the canvas cloth which will yield less pressure when paint is then applied. Oil paint, itself pigments mixed with oil, may be diluted with other oils, to stretch the pigment further or to infuse them with rich glossy qualities that catch the eye. Oils may also be dissolved or diluted with spirits – turpentine for example, used to clean brushes, may also be utilised to break a paint’s heavy greasy texture on the canvas. Oils are malleable and the canvas provides surface-ality upon which they may be scraped, layered or diffused. Acrylic paint is synthetic – it dries quickly and can be layered or used as a ground upon which marks can be drawn with charcoal, pencil or ink. It is water-soluble with water taking the role of thinner or dilutant in the place of spirits, but only when the paint is wet. Water, applied to an unprimed canvas, can cause it to buckle or dent if it has been incorrectly stretched or stored – in direct heat for example. Materials such as these are often only considered posthumously, in the retouching of damaged works or in the scientific analysis of great masters. The artist is thought to be in clinical control of the instruments, as a chef to ingredients. However, the painter yields authority to their media when confronted with decisions of scale and physical content. They can be limited or enhanced in what they include with regards to canvas size and painting elements. This point in very clear to other painters – the physical handling and application of paint has its own unique language – expressible through renderment. We may begin to think of the canvas as vessel rather than surface – a carrier of media that informs artistic intention. If we are to reconsider, as Wollheim says, the activity of painting, then we must also rethink the painter/process relationship. We can consider this by examining two simple painterly decisions - a restricted palette and the leaving bare of canvas when constructing a work. As an example we can look to Barnett Newman.
Newman’s ‘Stations of the Cross’ (Fig.5) were first exhibited in 1966 in the Guggenheim gallery. He termed the collection ‘Lema Sabachthiani,’ referencing Christ’s human cry on the cross. Of the works, Danto writes:
‘The means could not be more simple: black and white paint on raw canvas, which he used as a third colour...Newman seems to have used black to represent a profound state of change...The first several paintings have black as well as white stripes (or zips as he came to call them, referring perhaps to the sound that masking tape makes when it is pulled away). Black entirely disappears in the Ninth Station, in which a strip of white paint runs up the left edge, and two thin parallel white stripes are placed near the right edge. The rest is raw canvas.’[11] (Fig.6)
We use the term raw to describe the canvas in an unaltered state – it has not been processed or tempered, bare cloth peeking through the planes of paint traversing the surface. These areas were constructed by placing masking tape on the unprimed canvas and painting a solid acrylic ground over, to reveal a too-thin, severe contrast upon its removal. In some cases, the tape is left on to construct its own ground – creating a different sense of depth. There is a sense that something is being uncovered and revealed to us in chinks and drips of information. Of the methodology, Tempkin writes:
‘The self-imposed limitations of the palette – black, white, and raw canvas – allowed Newman much room for variation, within a single painting or within the series. He used oil paint and three different synthetic paints. The various mediums that bind the pigments, and even the tape residue, all play a role in the appearance of surfaces. Newman’s use of differing quantities of medium in relation to the pigment also had significant repercussions...where a great deal of oil was used, it often bled beyond the painted area to form an amber stain on the raw canvas. Newman skilfully orchestrated the paint’s saturation, affecting the texture and density in the neighbouring areas of raw canvas. The canvas’s overall qualities of light and colour, (Fig.7) as well as the particular details of edges and borders, were wholly dependent on the associated applications of paint. [12]’
Newman’s handling of paint in this manner, the restriction of palette and the revealing of raw material, denote massive physical considerations in his process, linking posture, eye, canvas and the rendering of unfiltered paint. Many artists dedicate themselves to the blending of materials, using thinners, oils and the like, to execute works of extreme reality. Others use them in an unaltered way, lashing unmixed primary colours next to delicate muted tones to push and pull the eye. Tensions are created, firstly by fastening cloth to frame and secondly by the rendering of medium. These processes, so often described in an art appreciation sense to relay something of artistic intention play little role when it comes to the philosophy of painting. We rather discuss matters of temporality, of being in the world, of revelation, space-occupancy and dimensionality. We do see a shift from the consideration of the finished piece via spectator to an inspection of the artist’s role with Wollheim, for example, triumphing the artist’s eye or Dufrenne recognising intentionality. However the very practical physical application, the pictorial limits caused by these tools even, and the construction of vessels rather than surfaces should perhaps all be taken into consideration if we are to discuss notions of transcendence. The practical facets of painting are ignored in essence. We theorise about being in the world because we find ourselves in that world, drawing from a sense of habitation and presence – a shared feeling of tenancy. We discuss poetry and writing by referencing text – utilising known words to analyse. In our understanding of painting however, the limitations imposed by the non-communicability of a physical element lead us to disregard these elements as a messy physical side-effect of the finished works. We talk about painting with regards to what we see, rather than what we know, or what we think the artist may have felt, in order to communicate. The physical minerals of the painted work however, are crucial to developing a known understanding – one that is felt, rather than thought.
[1] Dufrenne, Mikel, In the Presence of the Sensuous, Essays in Aesthetics, Humanities Press International, 1987, p.4
[2] Dufrenne, Mikel, In the Presence of the Sensuous, Essays in Aesthetic, p.5
[3] Op.Cit
[4] Ibid.p.9
[5] Wollheim, Richard, Painting as an Art, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1987, p.22
[6] Ibid.p.18
[7] Ibid.p.43
[8] Ibid.p.86
[9] Crowther, Paul, The Phenomenology of Modern Art, Exploding Deluze, Illuminating Style, Continuum, 2012, p.93
[10] Leja, Michael, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s, Yale University Press, 1993, p.122
[11] Danto, Arthur, Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life, Columbia University Press, 2005, p.195
[12] Tempkin, Ann, ‘The Stations of the Cross,’ Barnett Newman, Ed. Shiff, Richard, Tempkin, Ann, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Press, 2002, p.229
‘Thus the aesthetic object is perceived as real without referring to the real, to a cause for its appearing that is, to painting as a canvas, music as a sound of instruments ... The aesthetic object is nothing more than the sensuous in all its glory, whose form, ordering it, manifests plenitude and necessity, and which carries within itself and immediately reveals the meaning which animates it.’[3]
The immediacy of the subject/object relationship leads to its singleness. It is dependent on a viewer to testify to its being in the word by a mode of sense perception rather than comprehension. Before stating ‘what is this’ or ‘this is what it is’ I rather say ‘I see it, it is here.’ Dufrenne positions the viewer not only as witness but also as agent whose interrelation and reaction not only confirms the work but in fact completes it. The action of completion in turn attests to the process by which the object was made. The object, deposed as a manifestation of the sensuous, exhibits the intentionality of the creator. He explains this affective quality of the aesthetic object stating that they constitute specific a priori whereby something of the object must be present in the subject prior to all experience. In turn, something of the subject relates to the structure by which the object is presented prior to perception. This knowing – connaître, results in new knowing – reciprocity Dufrenne defines as ‘mutual birth’ – co-naître. He explains:
‘This conception of the a priori clarifies intentionality. By explicating the affinity of the subject and object, it cautions against both the naturalism that conceives of the subject as a product of the world, since the subject is capable of anticipating the world, and against the idealism that conceives of the world as a product of the subject, since the object carries meaning in itself.’[4]
Richard Wollheim also seeks to investigate modes of intention and artistic practice to address the character of painting – the finished products of artistic activity. He too utilises the word ‘agent’ but in this instance it is attributed to the artist whose intention, he claims, work separately to standard histories or traditions. If executed correctly, the products of artistic agency will have great effect upon the viewer – ones that will reveal the intentionality of the work and the artist themselves. He denies the standard determinants for meaning instead drawing from a psychological analysis to account for the effects of the activity of painting. He writes:
‘The marked surface must be the conduit along which the mental state of the artist makes itself felt within the mind of the spectator if the result is to be that the spectator grasps the meaning of the picture.’[5]
In ‘Painting as an Art’ Wollheim discusses intentionality under the headings of ‘style’ and ‘UR-Painting’ (Ur meaning Origin). Style, he states, has a ‘psychological reality’ – he equates it to language in the sense that one can know a language but they can have a style. One’s individual style affects the artist or ‘agent’ on a deep psychological level. It is a more profound vehicle than language due to its innate explanatory power. Style has until now been a tool of classification – a determining of characteristics and distinctive qualities, Baroque, for example. Wollheim however, wishes to examine it as a type of ‘thematization.’ Style incorporates the ‘minute aspects’ of the artist’s mark – the generation of stains and lines which lead to a distinctive set of processes by which they work. There is an assimilation of various media to produce meaning. It is the ‘banking’ of these processes that lead to an artist’s style. He likens this to a personality – something ‘immutably fixed’ which fulfil the artists intention at a constant visual point.
Ur-Painting then, he calls ‘the development of an activity that isn’t painting but it like it.’[6] (p.18) It is the action of the positing of marks upon a flat surface which leads to an evocation of new attention and positioning. The agent makes a mark – this in turn becomes relative in its relation to the edge of that marked surface. The agent becomes influenced by this contrast and places another mark, which in turn, becomes correspondent to edge, surface and previous mark. We see a relationship form between mark, surface and edge and the beginning of a negotiation of the factors. There is a dimensional aspect to the surface now with two becoming three – a sense of being able to ‘see in’ and ‘through’ the surface. This ‘seeing-in’ or ‘two-foldness’ will now influence the way the painter works. A construction of motif may occur – this action mirroring the previously mentioned ‘banking’ of process culminating in an inherent artistic style.
He concludes that if we are to understand when painting is an art we must return to the perspective of the artist, starting from their position as creator. While works of art can, to a point, have social functions, this role does not inform our curiosity as to the meaning of the work and the artist’s will. We must reconsider the spectatorial role – where Dufrenne speaks of the agent as spectator ‘completing’ the work of art, Wollheim suggests that the artist works as agent and spectator of their own work in processing a piece. He states:
‘Inside each artist is a spectator upon whom the artist, the artist as agent, is dependent. And this dependence is enshrined in what is one of the few constancies in the history of pictorial art: that is, the artist’s posture, or that, in the act of painting, he positions himself in front of the support, on the side of it that he is about to mark, facing it, with his eyes open and fixed upon it.’[7]
He places the act of painting and the resultant works back in the realm of painterly vision. He exalts the artist’s eye and posture with these factors shaping the very physical elements of artistic intention. While the spectator’s encounter of a painting must coincide with the artist’s vision for the considered experience of the work, Wollheim writes that it does not have to do so solely ‘through knowledge of it.’ Rather, he writes:
‘The artist’s intention ... should not be understood narrowly. It is not enough for the artist to set himself to mark the canvas with the mere aim that the spectator should see it in a certain way or as having these rather than those projective memories. Intention must be understood so as to include thoughts, beliefs, memories, and, in particular, emotions and feelings, that the artist had and that, specifically, caused him to paint as he did.’[8]
By looking at the aesthetic philosophy of Dufrenne and Wollheim we can identify common themes on the nature of painting. There are clear, direct references to the importance of artistic intention – the sensuousness of the object in and of itself, the subject/object or spectator/painting relationship and the role of agent – both as witness to complete the work and as artistic spectator of one’s own vision. Crucially, Wollheim makes distinction and reveals the importance of the physical requisites for creating a work – the artist’s eye and posture, with each contributing essential activity to the process by which a painting is made. Each of these philosophers demonstrate the importance of intention and methodology in our understanding of the finished work, however there is another facet to consider when we ask questions of aesthetic perception and experience. This is the notion of productive render-ment. To render something is a causal act – to cause something to be or become, to portray or produce. It is the bringing into space some form of being that was not there before. It is a transitive action – one that requires an object to receive activity, in this instance a designated surface or area upon which material is deposited to create forms and imagery. It we are to cede to the notion of artistic intention and process in order to categorically define important factors of the resulting painted element then it is also vital that we consider what Wollheim calls the ‘inert material’ by which they were made.
Let us refer to the following images. The first slide (Fig. 1) depicts the American artist Jackson Pollock constructing one of his famous drip paintings in 1949. Photographed for Life magazine, the images portray Pollock as a ‘virile, hard-drinking Macho man’ at work creating the pieces. The publication of the photographs in no small part contributed to Pollock’s reputation as a great painter, prompting the question in 1950 ‘is this the world’s greatest living artist?’ The photograph shows him kneeling on the edge of the canvas, perched resolutely, frowning and reaching directly into the centre. In his hand he cradles a tin of paint. There are a build-up of such tins to his left, paint-dripped, open, some containing brushes, awaiting use. There are several different tones on display on the canvas ground, each indicating a different colour or material used. Pollock holds a long, smothered brush, consumed with glots of paint that drip and run onto the canvas. There is no break in the liquid run-off, we can see directly the line of medium as it spatters form, traversing a looping conduit from canvas to brush and brush to artist. Of his ‘action’ painting Crowther writes:
‘Pollock’s optical-planar evocation of process means that both the transient individual dimension and the constancy of process, per se, are made complementary, and are, thence, expressed with a directness that eludes more figurative modes of representation.’[9]
The next image depicts Pollock as a more considered painter. (Fig.2) Still perched at the side of the floored canvas, this time he rests on both haunches, again frowning but with brush tilted and angled upwards, measuring the paint-flow, slowing it to delay the intensity. The dense black tone of the medium stands in contrast to the light-infused ground of the canvas. His stance betrays a more constructive methodology whereby the paint still flows but with a greater degree of control. The dripping run-off is slightly depleted, pooling instead in a dense organic looking form at Pollock’s centre. In figure three, (Fig.3) still with canvas on the horizontal, he leans quite heavily over the painting, can held as a bucket with brush in the process of flicking. The sudden fitful vibrations of paint betray the action of the piece – brief motion fuelled applications of media that criss-cross a designated canvas area. These are exercises in mark making, the generation of flicks and spatters to create form. The canvas ground serves as a type of inertia – a foil to the thick heavy splashes and agitation of the applied paint.
We have a different kind of aesthetic experience when we now look at a painting by Pollock, having witnessed the moment of inception. However, the images depict much more than just the artist at work. They clearly show an artist focussed on the materiality and medium as much as the process by which he makes a piece. Michael Leja writes of Pollock: ‘fluid and elegant poured lines generate a viscous and turbulent surface, encrusting studio detritus such as nails, cigarettes and paint tube caps.’[10] Indeed a work from 1947, Full Fathom Five, (Fig.4) is considered an ‘oil’ painting. However, the media listed include nails, tacks, buttons, keys, coins, cigarettes, matches etc. He also painted works using enamel, acrylic and gouache and used sand to occupy thick gritty slabs. The ‘dasein’ of materials do as much to influence the process by which a painting is made as artistic conception. The painter-object process can be constructed through a deftness and clarity of mark that has as much to do with how sharp a pencil is pared, how lubricated the paint is or how quickly an acrylic ground dries, as artistic concepts and ideas. Artist’s painterly media are relegated to a mention on the museum information card – as important to note as the title and date and yet forgotten frequently when it comes to discussing vision, concepts, movements and objects.
If we are to consider Pollock’s action paintings with regards to Wollheim’s concept of intentionality we are reminded that we must include ‘thoughts, beliefs, memories and feelings’ in our appraisal, to fully understand when painting is an art. In the case of Pollock we are enveloped in the sensuousness of an object created as part of a process that now exists in and of itself. The paintings offer no consolation in the way of recognisable imagery. They project not even a void, serving instead to demonstrate the lush, painterly process by which Pollock worked. We see a building of motifs, as recounted by Wollheim – the banking of processes that lead to an artistic style. These are not motifs that are visually recognisable but instead testify to methodology. Described as labyrinthine by some, Parker Tyler writes:
‘What are his dense and spangled works but the viscera of an endless non-being of the universe? Something which cannot be recognised as part of the universe is made to represent the universe in the totality of being. So we reach the truly final paradox of these paintings: being in non-being.’
Canvas Preparation
1. Artists do not buy canvases, we build them, stretch them, treat them, prime them
2. They have to be stretched/pulled in a certain way, otherwise the canvas will warp or dent, the frame will buckle etc. This extremely hard on the hands and body, burns hands etc. Very time consuming
3. When we are creating an artwork in this way we are designating a space – the artist is creating a point/area to deposit theory – we talk of space occupancy and being - a thing ‘in and of itself’ but we ignore this process, the point of designation for rendering is very important and considered much more than we believe
Let us consider the notion of canvas. It is the physical enduring surface upon which paint is applied in order to render image or form. While some artists paint on boards, on walls or primed fabriano paper (watercolourists for example), the application of oil paint is generally reserved for the canvas surface – the tensile weave that bounces back swathes of oily pigment. Canvases are subject to much abuse. Firstly, there is the construction of a wooden frame that must be reinforced and bolstered at the corners and centre upon which a heavy canvas cloth is stretched and stapled into place. This cloth may then be primed with a surface paint that dries and solidifies priming and smoothing the area. It may also be painted with size; a strong-smelling rabbit-skin glue that is heated to varnish and stretch the canvas cloth which will yield less pressure when paint is then applied. Oil paint, itself pigments mixed with oil, may be diluted with other oils, to stretch the pigment further or to infuse them with rich glossy qualities that catch the eye. Oils may also be dissolved or diluted with spirits – turpentine for example, used to clean brushes, may also be utilised to break a paint’s heavy greasy texture on the canvas. Oils are malleable and the canvas provides surface-ality upon which they may be scraped, layered or diffused. Acrylic paint is synthetic – it dries quickly and can be layered or used as a ground upon which marks can be drawn with charcoal, pencil or ink. It is water-soluble with water taking the role of thinner or dilutant in the place of spirits, but only when the paint is wet. Water, applied to an unprimed canvas, can cause it to buckle or dent if it has been incorrectly stretched or stored – in direct heat for example. Materials such as these are often only considered posthumously, in the retouching of damaged works or in the scientific analysis of great masters. The artist is thought to be in clinical control of the instruments, as a chef to ingredients. However, the painter yields authority to their media when confronted with decisions of scale and physical content. They can be limited or enhanced in what they include with regards to canvas size and painting elements. This point in very clear to other painters – the physical handling and application of paint has its own unique language – expressible through renderment. We may begin to think of the canvas as vessel rather than surface – a carrier of media that informs artistic intention. If we are to reconsider, as Wollheim says, the activity of painting, then we must also rethink the painter/process relationship. We can consider this by examining two simple painterly decisions - a restricted palette and the leaving bare of canvas when constructing a work. As an example we can look to Barnett Newman.
Newman’s ‘Stations of the Cross’ (Fig.5) were first exhibited in 1966 in the Guggenheim gallery. He termed the collection ‘Lema Sabachthiani,’ referencing Christ’s human cry on the cross. Of the works, Danto writes:
‘The means could not be more simple: black and white paint on raw canvas, which he used as a third colour...Newman seems to have used black to represent a profound state of change...The first several paintings have black as well as white stripes (or zips as he came to call them, referring perhaps to the sound that masking tape makes when it is pulled away). Black entirely disappears in the Ninth Station, in which a strip of white paint runs up the left edge, and two thin parallel white stripes are placed near the right edge. The rest is raw canvas.’[11] (Fig.6)
We use the term raw to describe the canvas in an unaltered state – it has not been processed or tempered, bare cloth peeking through the planes of paint traversing the surface. These areas were constructed by placing masking tape on the unprimed canvas and painting a solid acrylic ground over, to reveal a too-thin, severe contrast upon its removal. In some cases, the tape is left on to construct its own ground – creating a different sense of depth. There is a sense that something is being uncovered and revealed to us in chinks and drips of information. Of the methodology, Tempkin writes:
‘The self-imposed limitations of the palette – black, white, and raw canvas – allowed Newman much room for variation, within a single painting or within the series. He used oil paint and three different synthetic paints. The various mediums that bind the pigments, and even the tape residue, all play a role in the appearance of surfaces. Newman’s use of differing quantities of medium in relation to the pigment also had significant repercussions...where a great deal of oil was used, it often bled beyond the painted area to form an amber stain on the raw canvas. Newman skilfully orchestrated the paint’s saturation, affecting the texture and density in the neighbouring areas of raw canvas. The canvas’s overall qualities of light and colour, (Fig.7) as well as the particular details of edges and borders, were wholly dependent on the associated applications of paint. [12]’
Newman’s handling of paint in this manner, the restriction of palette and the revealing of raw material, denote massive physical considerations in his process, linking posture, eye, canvas and the rendering of unfiltered paint. Many artists dedicate themselves to the blending of materials, using thinners, oils and the like, to execute works of extreme reality. Others use them in an unaltered way, lashing unmixed primary colours next to delicate muted tones to push and pull the eye. Tensions are created, firstly by fastening cloth to frame and secondly by the rendering of medium. These processes, so often described in an art appreciation sense to relay something of artistic intention play little role when it comes to the philosophy of painting. We rather discuss matters of temporality, of being in the world, of revelation, space-occupancy and dimensionality. We do see a shift from the consideration of the finished piece via spectator to an inspection of the artist’s role with Wollheim, for example, triumphing the artist’s eye or Dufrenne recognising intentionality. However the very practical physical application, the pictorial limits caused by these tools even, and the construction of vessels rather than surfaces should perhaps all be taken into consideration if we are to discuss notions of transcendence. The practical facets of painting are ignored in essence. We theorise about being in the world because we find ourselves in that world, drawing from a sense of habitation and presence – a shared feeling of tenancy. We discuss poetry and writing by referencing text – utilising known words to analyse. In our understanding of painting however, the limitations imposed by the non-communicability of a physical element lead us to disregard these elements as a messy physical side-effect of the finished works. We talk about painting with regards to what we see, rather than what we know, or what we think the artist may have felt, in order to communicate. The physical minerals of the painted work however, are crucial to developing a known understanding – one that is felt, rather than thought.
[1] Dufrenne, Mikel, In the Presence of the Sensuous, Essays in Aesthetics, Humanities Press International, 1987, p.4
[2] Dufrenne, Mikel, In the Presence of the Sensuous, Essays in Aesthetic, p.5
[3] Op.Cit
[4] Ibid.p.9
[5] Wollheim, Richard, Painting as an Art, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1987, p.22
[6] Ibid.p.18
[7] Ibid.p.43
[8] Ibid.p.86
[9] Crowther, Paul, The Phenomenology of Modern Art, Exploding Deluze, Illuminating Style, Continuum, 2012, p.93
[10] Leja, Michael, Reframing Abstract Expressionism, Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s, Yale University Press, 1993, p.122
[11] Danto, Arthur, Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life, Columbia University Press, 2005, p.195
[12] Tempkin, Ann, ‘The Stations of the Cross,’ Barnett Newman, Ed. Shiff, Richard, Tempkin, Ann, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Press, 2002, p.229