An Inquiry into Paul Cézanne The Role of the Artist in Studies of Perception and Consciousness (original) (raw)
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What's going on in the artist's brain during the creation of a work of art? 1 Before we can even begin to answer this question, we must recognise that it contains a hidden normative dimension. It's obvious that we aren't interested in every neural episode that occurs during the creative process, but only those that are somehow relevant to this process. The threshold of relevance may extend deep below the threshold of consciousness, encompassing nuanced emotional responses and faint traces of memory of which the artist is unaware, but it can't include everything. For instance, even if one acknowledges the importance of synaesthetic effects in the composition of visual works, this import only makes sense if it's limited to specific connections between the visual and other sensory modalities, e.g., alignments of colours and temperatures, shapes and sounds, etc., no matter how minimal the intensity of these connections. More generally, this notion of relevance makes no sense unless we understand the creative process as resulting in a genuine work of art, or, at the very least, as aiming at such a work. If nothing else, we are entirely uninterested in the brains of anyone trying to pass something off as art, however fascinating they might be in other respects. Herein lies the question's normative supposition.
Cézanne: comprehending the world as he saw it
Review of 'Paul Cézanne: Drawings and Watercolours' by Christopher Lloyd, published by Thames and Hudson, London, 2015. 320pp., 226 colour and b/w illustrations ISBN: 978 0 500 093870
Inspiration and Evaluation of Paintings of Cezanne
Chitrolekha International Magazine on Art and Design
Cezanne is a painter who existed in the era of discoveries, there was law of relativity as well as discontinuous travel of light. Despite all the scientificised discoveries and inventions, Cezanne was seeking inspiration from nature. Nature was the sole inspirer of him. Nature, he wanted to tap, the structure of, underneath in his paintings. During the times earlier to mid nineteenth century, symmetry was essential aspect of art as understructure, as in Piero della Francesca's artworks. During mid nineteenth century art was paving way to new paradigms. Painters display emotion, sentiment, capturing of form, structure, composition with line, color or form to fathom their artistic instincts. Here in this paper I display the luminous use of color by Cezanne and use of hidden geometry in the painting of Mont Sainte Victoire to elucidate his traits to capture nature to its truest form, asymmetry. In understructure also, this asymmetry is vocal in the pentagon formed at the focal point of painting. Our earth is the worthy example of asymmetry. As nature (earth) is asymmetrical so we find traits of asymmetry in Cezanne's understructure of painting. The inspiration of the artist lay in nature, so was his treatment of painting.
Cézanne’s 'Primitive' Perspective, or the 'View from Everywhere’
The Art Bulletin, 2013
The perspectival “distortions” commonly observed in Cézanne's paintings can be seen as the expression of “blind” visuomotor experiences as well as conscious visual perceptions. They thus correspond not to actual movements but to “virtual” movements internal to acts of perception of a kind described by Merleau-Ponty, which allow the perceiving subject a fuller sense of the physicality of things. Cézanne conveyed this form of engagement with things, alongside the appearances they present, by using varieties of parallel projection, often in disguise. His repudiation of perspective implies a repudiation of spectacle as the normative form of visual experience in modern life.
Neuroscience and the artist's mind
2010
This paper is a heuristic attempt to put art back into nature by trying to understand the biological basis of mind and its relation to the world. This relationship is negotiated at a physiological level by primary consciousness but, with the development of the human brain over time, higher-level consciousness has evolved symbolic systems to explore the significance of social and cultural experience, as well as to make forays into new ways of thinking about the world through recursive synthesis. The arts-including the visual arts-are an important field within higher-consciousness. Their significance for each of us is constrained by genetic inheritance, somatic and social evolution, and is part of the mental repertoire we utilise to process phenomenological experience within a social context.
Cézanne and the Phenomenon: Painting Divergences in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze [Video Embedded]
" Deleuze is often considered an anti-phenomenologist. He even writes disparagingly of phenomenology’s ‘paltry’ lived-body, which we find in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. Nonetheless, Deleuze still generated an original theory of phenomena. So rather than determining whether Deleuze was a phenomenologist or an anti-phenomenologist, we might instead attempt to formulate what a Deleuzean phenomenology would be. For Merleau-Ponty, phenomena are possible on account of three levels of harmonic integration: among the parts of the phenomenal world, among our body parts functioning in sensation, and between our body and the world enveloping us. All these overlappings bind us into the flesh of the world. Yet, a Deleuzean phenomenology would be based on precisely the opposite principles: the phenomenal world consists of incompatible differences shockingly forced upon us, all while our body functions disjunctively within itself and with our surroundings. Both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze express their different views through their divergent readings of quotations attributed to Cézanne, in some cases they read the exact same quotation in opposite ways. We will look then at these Cézanne passages to see how Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s philosophies of painting exhibit their very different phenomenal theories; and, we will consider the possibility that not only is a Deleuzean phenomenology possible, it may also be a superior means to account for the phenomenality of phenomena. Consider when Cézanne speaks of painting his ‘motif’ while rendering Mont Sainte-Victoire. He approaches his visual world as if his eyes were seeing it for the first time, which causes him to encounter a chaos of colors and forms that gradually organize into discernable perceptions. For Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne’s motif is his rendering not just what he sees, but also the way his visual data dynamically organizes by means of his immediate immersion in the world and through the intimate integration of his senses. In this way, he joins the ‘wandering hands’ of nature. To emphasize this, Cézanne clasps his hands together, declaring “this is a motif.” He continues to say that if his painting properly brings together all the visual elements in a way loyal to his activity of perceiving them, then his “painting joins its hands together.” For Merleau-Ponty, this intertwining weaves our organized body into the fabric or flesh of the world. Deleuze likewise speaks of Cézanne’s motif as an ‘intertwining.’ But it is a different sort. Cézanne says that the painter must decipher the ‘text’ of nature by painting his experience of sensing it. These texts are ‘parallel:’ nature seen (out there) and nature felt (inside us). Like Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze also notes how Cézanne approaches the chaos of sensations with the eyes of a newborn child. But for Deleuze, for the painter to render and convey a sensation, this would not arise if the painter’s inner workings were organizing the sensations into recognizable objects. Note how on our routine journey to work each day, we might recognize everything but arrive without noticing anything. Only if something out of the ordinary happens, like a traffic accident, will we take note of what we sense. But also, Deleuze is not interested merely in depicting the raw chaos of what is given to us, so a mess like Pollock will not produce sensations either, perhaps like how radio static soon fades from our attention. What interests Deleuze more is the way that our sensory systems modulate the sensory givens, rendering them under a varied form, putting them together in ways that are not implied in how they are given. Cézanne developed his technique of rendering not what he saw, but the way its parts modulated into a new field of visual differences. Hence Cézanne once painted a grey wall green. For Deleuze this is because when we have sensations, it is not because our perceptions organized into coherent objects. We have sensations when we shockingly encounter a world that impresses differences on us, which because of the disorganization of our perceptual faculties, we then vary into a new set of differences. Hence Cézanne’s motif, for Deleuze, is the mechanism that injects differential forces of variation into our sensation. We and the world do not intertwine in the sense of interlacing fingers. Cézanne clasping hands are more like a sudden clap sending shock waves throughout his body. Such shocks are what make things phenomenally stand-out in their appearance. "
THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION AND THE ARTIST WITHIN
This paper discusses the significance for the philosophy of perception and aesthetics of certain productions of the 'offline brain'. These are experienced in hypnagogic and other trance states, and in disease-or druginduced hallucination. They bear a similarity to other visual patterns in nature, and reappear in human artistry, especially of the craft type. The reasons behind these resonances are explored, along with the question why we are disposed to find geometrical complexity and 'supercolouration' beautiful. The paper concludes with a plea on behalf of neuroaesthetics, but with a caution or two.