ART

I do not pretend to be a painter.
I can make a wall a color or cut an edge.
I have been required to look at paintings and try to understand them.
Near the beginning of my formal training I was required to buy a camera and master black and white photography.
I called it learning to see. I am still working on that.
I am beginning to think in color and to get the light right.
I render objects in the course of my profession.

I took a course in the nineteenth century romantics some years ago. About half of it was painting, a quarter literature and a quarter music. It was an attempt at a survey in preparation for a course in the moderns. The moderns were my teachers and my teachers teachers. I do not know what to call the present. Postmodern begs the question. The recent paintings acquired by the Metropolitan are good. I can see them if I work at it.

From the beginning painters have found the medium limiting. Much of the history of painting is individual painters and schools of painting transcending those limits.
It occurs to me that I can analytically describe the limits of graphic media and perception. Then do a combinatoric exploration of methods and arrive at the complete set of graphic art. Such an effort would incomprehensible to any audience and useless to anyone not prepared to do it. Much work should never leave the studio.
An example of a method is the visual editing called abstraction. The practice begins with paint. The French cave paintings are abstract in that the color is only reminisent of the animals, the light is yellow and dim, the perspective is a guess, the scale is emotional rather than geometric. The pictures work for us and their creators. The ones that did not work were reworked. This kind of notation can become formal. Egyptian hieroglyphics or, more extreme, Ideograms of the Han. Descriptive painting is the tradition I am trying to examine.

Growing sophistication in the selection of details. The level of substitution of color and shadow for geometry.

Eventually the elimination of geometry entirely.

finally the elimination of internal edges.

Eventually a field of color that is in some way a description.

I will have to return to this. My thoughts have evanesced.

There is a narrative I have formed on this.

Photography was new in the middle of the nineteenth century. The invention
removed photorealism from the discourse of the study of painting. The students were left with the question of what a painter could do that a photographer could not do.
The accent changed from geometry and texture to color, light and interaction.
The critics called it impressionism.
As the possibilities of this change of vision filled out the daring became the fauves.