Mystery and Poetic Painting

Emil Carlsen, Still Life with Brass and Oysters

A post on "Mystery" over at oil painter Stapleton Kearns' blog has me thinking about the importance of indeterminacy in my own work and its role in what's often called "poetic" painting.

As Stape points out, by the subtle use of soft edges and careful value adjustments a painter can suggest what's in the picture (and even what isn't!) without having to fully describe it. 

If "prosaic painting" describes, poetic painting evokes. A refreshing sense of control comes in simply realizing that one needn't (and probably shouldn't) delineate every part of a picture with equal clarity (a hallmark, by the way, of so-called primitive painting; selective detail is learned from the history of painting). 

George Inness, Georgia Pines

When it's done properly, "leaving something for the viewer's imagination" (the way George Inness does in the landscape above) invites a deeper engagement. Look how vague (or "suggestive," I should say) the details are throughout, even where the action is, in the middleground and at the horizon. On a surface level, the viewer must participate to "complete" the picture, filling in details where none are given. Such a painting discloses itself in stages, unfolding gradually as elements assemble before the viewer. The result is a vital, animated work of art that offers an experience full of freshness and life.

Taken a step further into metaphysics, however, the use of indeterminacy in painting can correlate with the unspoken, if not the unsayable - the ineffable in poetry and in human experience. 

George Inness, Green Marches

For me, indeterminacy functions in much of Inness's "visionary" work by evoking what I'd call the unknowable quality of felt experience. Hence: mystery. In Inness's "Green Marshes," the entire painting takes on the indistinct, shimmering quality of an emotion, a memory, or a dream.

The material world in Inness's later paintings often borders on insubstantial because for Inness, painting increasingly became a way to explore the dual nature of the world as simultaneously "material" and divine. The late works function as expressions of (or analogues for) spiritual experience. 

William James noted that one of the defining characteristics of mystical experience is that it cannot adequately be put into words. The painter interested in mystery paints that which "cannot be pictured," that is, things that can only be suggested and evoked yet never fully defined.

George Inness, In the Orchard, Milton

Innes's In the Orchard, Milton contains very little that is clearly delineated besides the sinuous tree trunk in the middle of the composition (which itself has the quality of semi-transparency). The rest is so suggested that at first I thought the lighter vertical element to the right of the curvy trunk was the sunlit trunk of a larger tree. Suddenly the figure of the woman coming toward us on the path vaporously emerged. The entire work comes to resemble a translucent tapestry, a lacy, gossamer veil swaying between one world and the next.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger described truth itself as aletheia, as an opening up, a "poetic revealing." In Being and Time, he describes meaning as a bringing-forth, rather than something we impose on the world. For Heidegger, meaning is a process of unconcealment, illuminating the essence of Being. By way of example, he writes about how Van Gogh's painting of a pair of old shoes conveys elements essential to humanity's relationship to the earth and, by extension, nature as a whole.

Vincent Van Gogh, A Pair of Shoes (1886)

By virtue of how suggestive these shoes are - not what the painting shows but what it alludes to, what such an image evokes about the life that has been lived in them - Heidegger  (and other philosophers, more or less) see an artist conceptualizing and presenting the essence of "shoeness."

For Heidegger, too, there's a "shining" quality to art's revelation of essential Being, something not unlike the "radiance" in Joyce's translation of Aquinas's model of beauty as wholeness, harmony, and radiance. Heidegger writes, "this shining (the "shining" of illuminated Being) joined in the work, is the beautiful. Beauty is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealedness" (Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art). If any true work of art would have this quality of showing forth essence or Being, the indeterminacy and "mystery" in Inness functions both as a visual metaphor for, as well as the enactment of it.

But this is mere description, and utterly subjective. A painting just is. As my friend Dermot O'Brien recently reminded me, certain strangely emotive and vital works of art and literature magnificently and simply "refuse to permit reductive explication, much like life and love."

The Tonal Van Gogh

Autumn Landscape with Four Trees, Vincent van Gogh, 1885

Earlier in his career, Vincent van Gogh experimented with the styles of his time, including Impressionism, capturing light and movement with swift, unfussy brushstrokes, and a kind of tonalism, perhaps based on the earth-tone palette of his homeland's "old masters," restricting his colors to just a few related hues and exploring a range of midtones, lights, and darks within them.

Autumn Landscape allowed van Gogh to explore dynamic rhythms not only at the level of the image but on the surface of the painting. The bold, directional way he laid strokes of tone-related color on the sky creates a horizontal rolling "s" motion that hints at the future dynamism in Starry Night.

Just considering the use of line, the sky's undulations are gently counterpointed by the hilly ground. But the vital energy in this painting comes from the contrary directions that the paint takes throughout the whole.

Van Gogh juxtaposes horizontal brushstrokes in the foreground and vertical strokes in the vegetation around the tree trunks and background trees. He mixes the two in the dominant tree's foliage at the composition's center to create a vivid burst of leaves and branches that supports a strong sense of motion in the curvature of the trees toward the left.

In the landscape below, van Gogh uses the same techniques in a more modest application while brightening the intensity ("chroma") of the colors.

Although he's often associated in the public mind with wild, bright colors, he primarily used color expressively - to create emotion-charged visions of his world.

Shoes, Vincent van Gogh, 1888

In the process, he often used what I would consider a tonal approach to convey a subtle, muted complexity and a somber, poetic mood.