The Mind of the Artist
The conventional understanding of painting is that an artist puts paint on a canvas to capture what he sees. If now we move to a new understanding, that painting is the conveyance of the beauty of the artists’ mind, a sort of radical idealism can emerge.
In laying down paint, the artist demonstrates that they are awake to their senses. Consider that no child under the age of 10 has ever produced a hyperrealistic painting. Yet there exists one child prodigy with expert skill in some other domain for every 10 million people. The separation of self from the sense image that one experiences is late to develop, which, as an effect, is put into motion by the expansion of the cognitive schema that is imperceptibly overlaid on top of our sense experience.
In other words, as we grow, we undergo an expansion of the cognitive ability to recognise and appreciate the full palette of the properties of the material world which manifest in front of us.
The human experience of the world, our unique mode of access, is an organisational form that we likely share with some of our primate cousins. It is not entirely unbelievable to think that the chimpanzee sees colour in the same way that we do; but the distinguishing factor is that very cognitive schema which provides us with the faculties of imagination, reason or the fully developed aesthetic sense. Through painting, we demonstrate the power of the mind to depict what it contains within it. In some sense, we also vicariously depict the power of evolution, which works as a sort of ephemeral ventriloquist from afar, in having sculpted our aesthetic sensibility. The philosopher Mohan Matthen writes:
“Evolution is not like a Colourist, painting colours into a scene already delineated. It is much more like a technician tweaking the performance characteristics of a system—changing the sensors, adding filters, rerouting data, fiddling with ‘gain’—to create new discriminations within an older format.”
What Matthen has in mind is the format of classification and specialisation of the senses as they occur across species. As an example, how our mind structures colour differs to the environmental structuring needs of some other animal. Despite that difference, all animals share the format that is sense perception. But for humans, it is through painting that we partly express the coloured mental structure that most of us are born with, and the sensibility for art.
In depicting our coloured visual system through painting, we give an appreciation of the interaction between the nature of light and the painted object as it appears in our minds. Yet our colourised visual system is not the only natural faculty that we depict through painting. The maker of the painting determines the accuracy of the painted object as it appears in their mind. They calculate the size and shape of objects relative to the scene in front. Artists convey that the human mind has the capacity for being precise; the very faculty which, according to Simon Winchester, has “put more transistors in electronics than all the leaves on all the world’s trees”.
It’s not only our capacity for precise science or colour vision that’s demonstrated through the activity of painting. We also convey a representation of the existence of something far stranger: the relation between consciousness and the visual field. There is a communication through painting of the unimaginable prospect that consciousness exists as a computational engine embedded inside a brain with only the visual image to look at.
Beyond the terrifying and stomach-churning thesis of “connectionism”, the artist through painting moreover conveys his temporal and mortal nature; that paintings are “songs of mortality sung by the prisoners of time”. Not only is an unmoving, represented snapshot of durable reality captured in a painting, but the artist also conveys a point of view in the torrent of time which he finds himself caught up in.
Yet again, neither precise science, the coloured visual system or the artists temporal nature are the only worldly properties that he is able to convey through his aesthetic sensibility. Emotional life is part of the binding in any creation of a painting. The artist can point us, through the represented image on the canvas, to joy, nostalgia, pain, regret, or to concepts he envisages that we might be able to build in the future. He can moreover confuse us, or render something in a nuanced way, as indicated in mythological paintings.
By arranging objects on his canvas in the same manner in which they appear to him in perception, the artist exhibits the categorical structuring prowess of the mind. That the mind organises objects as being arranged in space. In doing so, the artist is secretly, and likely unbeknown to him, replicating the beauty of the mind onto the canvas. Just as the subject of his painting is the content of his mind, the artist is also unwittingly hoping to prove that, in the creation of his painting, the external world is in fact real.
References:
Philebus, Plato
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, Richard Eldridge
The Aesthetic Theories of French Artists, Charles Gauss
Seeing, Doing and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception, Mohan Matthen
Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World, Simon Winchester
Alla Prima, Richard Schmid