"......Be what it is, The Action of my life is like it, which I'll keep if but for sympathy."
Thursday, 25 August 2011
Wat is kunst? - de blik in zijn ogen -dat is kunst
Oh my god, I've been staring at this sketch for almost an hour now and I cannot stop. What have I done? I cannot come to terms with it, I'm seeing all at once; every detail and the whole at the same time. Usually I'm very bad at sketching or drawing, simply awful and I never catch what I intended. At the academy people kept repeating I should try drawing, but I am a painter, it's colour, painting it layer for layer almost shining through what I'm interested it - it's a passage.
Yet what have I got here, the expression on the face is forward and closed at once, there are in fact two faces to be seen, one painted, superficial and the other that is more true, a person facing you. It's looking at me and it is telling me something about himself, yet it is also an entity I can never fully grasp or define. I cannot possess this person. On a more formal basis I'm also seeing both at once, the (concrete) lines that make up the (abstract) face, I've tried to concentrate on the single aspect, it's hard to achieve, because every time I do I just realise how those lines fit in perfectly and none is too much and there is no line missing. Everything falls in place, like it was planned from the beginning of all time.
Then I had to realise that Michael is still right, I could spend a decade or hundred years trying to resketch this - I will never achieve it. Arthur C Danto's gedankenexperiment of the computer recreating by chance Rembrandt's Nightwatch - yes in the book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace it is the Nightwatch! - for me is now resolved: even if there was a painting computer who would have the time to try for aeons, it would never make it happen because every single line, decision by the artist - or in fact by whomever - is the product of the most singular present/ presence, and this presence/ present is almost a nothing, a strange point - with the mathematical extension of nil - inbetween the past and the future. Nothing one could actually grasp, try to catch the moment, and then think about the fact that scientist's are saying that our brains are always a tick behind the now.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Now pray that you're lucky enough...
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete