Paintings and Photographs (original) (raw)
Related papers
Painting can only be thought in relation to the image. And yet, with (and within) painting what continues to endure is the image of painting. While this is staged explicitly in, for example, paintings of St. Luke by artists of the Northern Renaissance-e.g., Rogier van der Weyden, Jan Gossaert, and Simon Marmion-the same concerns are also at work within both the practices as well as the contemporaneous writings that define central aspects of the Italian Renaissance. The aim of this paper is to begin an investigation into the process by which painting stages the activity of painting. This forms part of a project whose aim is an investigation of the way philosophy should respond to the essential historicity of art (where the latter is understood philosophically).
Pictures, Truths and Methods: From Function to Form in Abstract Painting
Abstract Painting Now (symposium paper), 2019
This paper takes Patrick Heron’s assertion as to the abstract nature of painting as a starting point for a phenomenological investigation into the way in which abstract works comport themselves. How do abstract paintings attain meaningfulness, and along which communicative channels is meaning attainable? Perhaps in opposition to Picasso’s denial of the possibility of abstract art, and affirmation of the vitality of figurative painting (and restatement of: ‘the power of the object’), Heron presented an alternative idea; declaring all painting to be, in effect, of the abstract. In positing an abstract primacy to one’s experience of the world in painting – Heron’s thesis, I will argue, opens more doors than it closes. In support of his hypothesis, Heron drew together the terms: ‘space’, ‘colour’ and ‘form’ – the bedrock of countless claims regarding abstraction’s truth – and invoked an: ‘abstract reality’, which painting (including that which is usually taken to be figurative painting) is seen to embody. The relationship of abstract painting to the world has proven to be a problematic one. To revisit it is to wrestle with the notion of resemblance, and therefore to speculate as to how it is that one thing is able to point to another. In this work I will examine the degree to which abstraction – as idea – is compatible with an understanding of the serviceability of pictures, and, in so doing, shed light on the extent to which pictures might operate within painting as both language and something else. Central to this is a consideration of the limits of that which is deemed communicable; the method of comprehending abstract painting’s truth(s); what it is that the spectator is able to bring to the table; and how this bringing to can be woven into a fuller conception of abstract painting’s particular operability…from which colour, form and space might be made sense of. I will position abstract painting as an involvement: a form of engagement from which the spectator might come to better understand an engagement with form.
Photographic Phenomenology as Cognitive Phenomenology
British Journal of Aesthetics, 2015
Photographic pictorial experience is thought to have a peculiar phenomenology to it, one that fails to accompany the pictorial experiences one has before so-called 'handmade' pictures. I present a theory that explains this in terms of a common factor shared by beliefs formed on the basis of photographic pictorial experience and beliefs formed on the basis of ordinary, face-to-face, perceptual experience: the having of a psychologically immediate, non-inferential etiology. This theory claims that photographic phenomenology has less to do with photographs themselves, or the pictorial experiences they elicit, and is a matter of our cognitive response to those experiences. I illustrate this theory's benefits: it is neutral on the nature of photography and our folk-conception of photography; it is consistent with photographic phenomenology's being contingent; and it accounts for our experiences of hyperrealistic handmade pictures. Extant theories of photographic phenomenology falter on one or more of these issues.
The Idiom in Photography As the Truth in Painting
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2002
... in terms of questioning painting's ability to represent history at all, at having perhaps lost this contract to photography. ... in the same somber, gray-black monochrome as the rest of the series, this painting largely meets ... The other images in the series are "after" images in two senses ...
Role of photography in the interpretation of art and reality
Photographers caused painters to reevaluate their ideas of what represented art. Since realistic paintings were replaced by photographs in the 19th century, realism became outdated and painters began experimenting with different styles of representations such as cubism and expressionism. The question arises whether photography liberated art? and how did it led to a change in our way of perceiving art and reality?
Painting, Moving Images and Philosophy
Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image n.10, 2018
Susana Viegas and James Williams (Eds), "Painting, Moving Images and Philosophy", Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image n. 10, Dec 2018. ARTICLES . Painting at the Beginning of Time: Deleuze on the Image of Time in Francis Bacon and Modern Cinema, David Benjamin Johnson . “Each Single Gesture Becomes a Destiny”: Gesturality between Cinema and Painting in Raúl Ruiz’s L’hypothèse du Tableau Volé, Greg Hinks . Whither the Sign: Mohammed Khadda in Assia Djebar’s La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua, Natasha Marie Llorens . Manet and Godard: Perception and History in Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Pablo Gonzalez Ramalho . A Work of Chaos: Gianluigi Toccafondo’s Animated Paintings, Paulo Viveiros . Ill Seen, Ill Said: The Deleuzian Stutter Meets the Stroop Effect in Diana Thater’s Colorvision Series (2016), Colin Gardner . Blue Residue: Painterly Melancholia and Chromatic Dingnity in the Films of David Lynch, Ed Cameron
Why Painting Matters: Some Phenomenological Approaches
Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2017
The question of the value of painting – why paintings should matter to us - has been addressed by a number of Phenomenological philosophers. In this paper I critically review recent discussions of this topic by Steven Crowell and Paul Crowther - while also looking back to work by Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry. All the views I discuss claim that painting is important (at least in part) because it can make manifest certain philosophically important truths. While sympathetic to this approach, I discuss various problems with it. Firstly, are these truths verbally explicable, or only communicable through the art-work itself? Secondly, if its truthfulness is the reason why we value painting, can this criterion track our intuitive judgements about relative artistic merit? Thirdly, can the truthfulness of painting be a reason for valuing it if that truth is divorced from its traditional association with Beauty and Goodness? I suggest ways in which the first and second problems could in principle be solved, but argue in response to the third that truth must indeed be seen in the context of other values if it is to explain why painting matters.
Optical Versus Cognitive Perspective: Study of Indian Folk Paintings
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities Vol. 13, No. 4, 2021. 1-10, 2021
Is painting space fundamentally perspectival? In the European Renaissance (14th to the 17th century), the painting space was thought of as having an interior of perspective where one could place an object. It took many years after the Renaissance for European art to come out of this optical or geometrical perspective and realise that the space of painting is fundamentally non-perspectival. Historically in Europe, impressionists (1860) painters are the ones who tried to break away from this optical or single-point perspective and create paintings according to 'lived perspective'. Optical perspective is one of the visual dogmas which are believed till today; thus, it is tough to appreciate non-perspectival paintings. This paper aims to give technical reasons why painting space is fundamentally not perspectival; the first section of the paper will deal with the question 'what kind of space is painting space?', and in the second section, we will compare method of photograph and drawing to find the differences between mechanism of camera and human perception. In the last section of the paper we will use Indian folk paintings, to demonstrate how cognitive or alternative/multiple perspectives open new possibilities in painting space.