Painting is a Revelation of Being

Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Canal, 1890, 19" x 25"

“Painting isn’t about beauty.  Beauty is about consciousness.  Beauty is a gateway, an adornment and invitation to space.  The space within the painting.  And space is consciousness.  Space is being.  When we paint we are exploring being.  That is why we need the three dimensional illusion – it isn’t an illusion, it is a gateway – to being...  

.... We are experimenting with different ways of being.  See Rembrandt.  Cezanne.  Monet.  Morandi.  Matisse.  Titian.  Piero.  Chardin.  Soutine.  Martin.  De Kooning.  Diebenkorn.  Auerbach.  Kossoff.  Giacometti.  Resnick.  This is what painting has to offer.  It isn’t the object, for God’s sake.  It is being."

 -Jordon Wolfson
How Painting Can Save the World, Actually

Rembrandt, The Mill

Wolfson's words above, taken from his essay How Painting Can Save the World, Actually seem to me a helpful answer to the questions that haunt every artist, chief among them, what is art and what is it for? What's the real purpose and value of this thing we do called painting, especially in THIS world, as it is NOW.

Cezanne, Bathers

Even if you think all you're doing is painting what your eyes are seeing, your work is still an answer to that question, whether you're conscious of it or not. It matters because the paintings you make will define your stance on the purpose of art whether you like it or not.

Monet's Waterlilies at Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris

This has nothing to do with style. As Wolfson writes in How Painting Can Save the World, Actually, it's not even what painting is but what beauty can do for us that's at the heart of the matter. 

Morandi, Still Life, 1956

It isn't about what a given painting does or doesn't look like. It doesn't matter how detailed, how loose, tight, realistic or abstract. It's how we experience it - what we experience when we're willing to enter into it as open, attentive viewers - that counts. So painting ends up being about connecting with someone who shares their own connection with the world. Beauty is about Being.  

Matisse, Open Window at Colliure, 1905

I like how he equates the space within a painting with consciousness, which he sees as also a kind of mental space: "Space is consciousness. Space is being." This to me implies that very flat paintings (Warhol's for example) in effect shut down the viewer's ability to mentally inhabit them and experience them as a corollary of human consciousness (surely one of Warhol's intentions). It's very easy to forget spatial dimensionality when painting abstractly, and this is one reason many abstract paintings don't emote very much to speak of.

Titian, David and Goliath, 1580

If "beauty is about consciousness," painted beauty is an "invitation" to a mentally inhabitable space in which the mind encounters a metaphor for the otherwise occult network of relations between itself and the world.

Pippa Hale-Lynch, Grief: Self-Portrait with Jam, 2024, oil 

Painting invites us to a revelation of being.

Chardin, The Ray, 1728

Soutine, Still Life with Ray Fish, 1924

Hyman Bloom, The Bride, 1942

What follows are some additional excerpts from this provocative essay.

Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963

"Painting does have a necessary and ancient function; it isn’t to depict the world—it is to weave the world; or rather, it is to reveal and make visible the actual weave of the world, the weave that already exists.  What does this mean?  When we paint we have the possibility of bringing our selves into the work—bringing our life force into the mark, the material, bringing our actual being, in this very moment, as it is, into our touch and setting free that vibration and energy.  To do this is not easy, although it is simple." 

de Kooning, Long Island landscape, c. 1980s

"But it means daring to bring our actual selves, as we are, without judgment, into the work. It is also a risk and challenge to receive work, to open ourselves up to painting as a force from another person, another life, to feel safe enough to receive that force and allow it in.  This also is not easy, although this too is simple.  And we find that when we do open to the given surface that there may be a sense of aesthetic force, perhaps beauty, perhaps sheer presence, a kind of transmission from one person to another through the material."

Rothko

"I want to express my feelings, not illustrate them." - Jackson Pollock

"When we paint we are not simply making images, we are weaving our subjectivities, and we are doing this through the medium of colored mud on a flat surface—dumb material participating in the exchange and heightening of awareness.  Painting is not simply an activity of self expression—it is an activity of interbeing, of our intersubjectivity, of our actual interconnectedness.  Painting reveals this, gives proof to it in its very nature.  We are not who we think we are."  

Diebenkorn, from the Ocean Park series, 1976

"Painting carries the possibility of getting us out of our minds and into an awareness of our being.  That is what occurs when we receive a painting, whether from another’s hands or from our own.  The reality of our experience facing great painting, the power and force of transmission remains a mystery as long as we remain in the story of Separation."

Marilyn Minter, Mudbath, 2006, Enamel on Metal, 84 x 120 inches

"As we dare to allow our minds to enter into the story of Interbeing, painting affirms the larger truth of this new story.  Its essential nature re-storys the world, reimagining who we are and where we are going.  As we paint we have the possibility to not only make an object to look at, but to retell our story."

Aurbach, Head of Gerda Boehme

"Painting is currently trapped within the category of fine art.  But what if painting isn’t about a picture, isn’t even about an object.  What if painting, actually, is about the interaction between two minds, two hearts, two beings—the painter and the viewer?  What if painting is about a way of coming to the world, a kind of communion?"  

Leon Kossoff, Head of Mother, 1965

"John Dewey writes in Art as Experience, 'In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience.  Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favorable to understanding.'"

Giacometti, Portrait of Anne, 1954

"In other words, there is no work of art outside of our experience; that is where the reality of art is located.  It is an interaction that reveals an inherent interconnectedness, an interbeing that reveals the illusion of separation. If that were our cultural story of painting what would that look like?  What would an exhibition look like?  Would that change the way we paint?  What happens to the fetish of the object?  The possibility of an interlacing communion through the lending of colored earth to human sensation: mud and oil embodying human consciousness."

Milton Resnick, Untitled, 1990

Milton Resnick

Ross Bleckner, Architecture of the Sky, c. 1980

What if painting’s function isn’t to depict the world but to make visible the interlace of reality and experience? What if the material conditions of painting conduct, through touch and vision, Being's very "vibration and energy?" To say it as Romantically as possible: What if mark, color, and rhythm aren’t “formal elements” but expressions of the life force itself?