I saw a wonderful realist painting today, a figure, somewhat larger than life and based on a 4x5 transparency; that is, it is an example of "photo realism" I also saw the source transparency.
We normally expect a photo realist painting to at least be faithful to the illumination of its source photo. But paradoxically, the illumination, the quality of lit atmosphere and reflection was far more convincing --and seemingly translucent -- in the painting than in the film of the transparency. I was stunned by this. The transparency looked so material, thick, artificial, blotchy, and the painting looked so luminous and yet the artist was not aiming for anything surreal or enchanted. The figure on the canvas was all but breathing and existing in my own airy space. Looking close, the paint was consistently somewhat pasty, not thick or brushy but opaque and evenly "skin thick" we might say. It seemed sort of dumb and plain, just doing its job by working itself into and all over each shape but not thoroughly filling in the canvas fabric. Frankly, it looked almost vulgar, ugly, unaffected, as it were, by the subject it defined and animated. The artist was not, apparently, swooning over this or that appealing feature of his model, but was instead doing his job, like buttering bread as a short order cook, and serving up a gourmet meal as if by magic...yet a magic already imagined as the paint went onto the surface! So this was my "aesthetic experience" and I was enthralled by the painting whose power for me lay in its contradiction between a truly "artless" application of opaque oil pigments and the fully convincing visuality of a "breathing" figure of flesh and bone -- worthy of the romantic poet's longest adjectives. The aesthetic delight must have something to do with the surprise of discovering how easily and quickly the brain can harmonize what we have rationalized or learned as disharmony -- in this case the abject paint application and fully appealing image it produces. How can an ugly cause lead to a lovely effect? But it can and does... everywhere in life if we admit it. We delight in the astonishing agility of our thoughts, feelings, emotions. We are empowered and made free. The artist of this painting I saw today demonstrated this. If there is an esthetic experience here, for me, and I think there is, it is something explained (if, in Kantian repose I choose to explain it) by the patterns of neural activity in my brain together with my keenness to the practices of painting, a memory of similar art, a familiarity of the cultural tropes of photography and even photo technology and most of all, my constant desire for more freedom of thought and experience -- of wanting to see the other side of the hill with every step. WC
