Please read the following essay and submit your comments to John Ford.
MONET
Out of the impressionistic dogma of light split up into its components on the canvas and optically recomposed in the spectator’s mind came the necessity to apply paint differently. The spectator, confronted by the seemingly loose, deliberately imprecise brushstrokes of Monet, by his transitory impressions of time fleeting on the surface of reality, has to contribute his share of participation. A painting never again would look photographically finished on the canvas: the ending had to be supplied by those who saw it. The demand for totally realistic art is an acknowledgment of mental laziness, a refusal of effort, and in the end a debasement of art and of the individual.
The
Gestalt theory of perception had around 1910 discovered that the human mind
tends to the act of closure; an unfinished, a suggested, circle looks to us
still like a circle. The “unfinished,” the incompletely defined canvases of
Monet are the incomplete aspects of reality that still look to us like reality,
and more so than the exact portrayal of nature by the realists. Even the great
representational painters always left in their art an escape for the
imagination; Rembrandt’s escape hatch lay in the miracle of illuminated form
losing itself in shadow.
Through
the interstices between the rough brushstrokes of the impressionists, mystery
could be sensed. For the painter seemed to say: This is all that can be
portrayed, the rest cannot be portrayed. To define form completely, to describe
all, “to finish”, is to die…
The
great painters knew that great secret and had the strength not to paint it. A
Chinese sage said:
The greatest perfection must appear
imperfect,
Then it will be infinite in its effect.
One
discovers how much a brushstroke is a true expression of the artist by studying
the earliest works of the great painters. In a corner of one of these canvases
there is always an area, seemingly unimportant, where a few brushstrokes,
become through the years the silent witnesses of the artist’s inescapable
nature. When, fifty or sixty years later, in the full possession of his
creative means, the artist paints a picture, the small original pattern of
brushstrokes, like a seed planted in fertile soil, has multiplied, and the
whole new canvas bears a profound resemblance to the original imprint of
personality.
The
brush is but the extension of the artist’s eye: as the needle of a seismograph
shows the slightest tremors of the earth, so the brush-needle shows on the
canvas the slightest tremors of the artist’s emotions. To free his eye, to
purify his vision, Monet attempted to disconnect his mind. Paul Valery defines
vision: “To see is to forget the names of the things one sees.” Monet tried to
connect in an inspired automatism the eye directly to the hand of the painter.
What do you think of this essay?
“I have noticed that when
one paints one should think of nothing:
everything then comes
better,” wrote the young Raphael to Leonardo.