THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF PAINTING

In The Phenomenology of Painting, Nigel Wentworth rejects some of the central tenets of traditional theories about painting – that a painting results from the painter’s intentions and that to understand the work properly a viewer has to read off from it what the painter intended it to mean. Instead, he argues – through a detailed analysis of how a painter works with his materials, as well as tone, color, and figurative elements – that in doing a painting the painter seeks to make it ‘work’, although he does not know in advance how it will and that a successful painting is one that works. This becomes the basis for a new theory of aesthetic quality, explicated through an account of the relationship between working and expression.

Nigel Wentworth is an independent scholar and practicing artist who lives in London.

THE
PHENOMENOLOGY
OF PAINTING

NIGEL WENTWORTH

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Nigel Wentworth 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typefaces Garamond 3 12/15 pt. and Avenir      System LATEX 2_e   [TB]

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Wentworth, Nigel, 1964–
      The phenomenology of painting / Nigel Wentworth.
         p.   cm.
      Includes bibliographical references and index.
      ISBN 0-521-81999-7 (HB)
      1. Painting – Philosophy.   2. Perception (Philosophy)   3. Painting – Psychological aspects.
   4. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)   I. Title.
   ND1140.W45   2004
   750′.1 – dc22                                                                                                   2003055421

ISBN 0 521 81999 7 hardback

To
Véronique Masurel,
who taught me the painting, and
David Murray,
who taught me the phenomenology

Contents

Illustrations

COLOR PLATES

Color Plates follow page xvi.

FIGURES

Preface

I am both a painter and a philosopher. The original impulse to write this book came from the radical difference I became aware of between how painting is understood within these two different practices. On the one hand, there was my own experience of painting and of looking at the painting of others; on the other, traditional philosophical as well as art historical accounts of painting, for instance the theories of art of the major philosophers and the theories implicit in many monographs on individual painters, the two being ultimately connected. What for me seemed vital and alive, both whilst painting myself and also viewing the paintings of others, seemed to become dead in the hands of intellectual writers. This gradually gave rise to my determination to provide a corrective account of what actually happens when a painter paints, and when a viewer looks at a painting, one that remained true to the vitality and openness of those processes. Through the training I received as a painter, my own work gradually became informed by an awareness of a practice of painting, existing through time and across cultures, and within which had worked the great painters down the ages to the present. That they had done so gradually became clear as I came to see that the structures and strictures of the practice that I was taught were also manifest in the work they produced. As such, I came to understand these structures to be constitutive of the very activity of painting. This understanding gradually gave substance to my grasp of the process of painting as vital and open. I came to see that these things were not just aspects of the process of painting that I happened to have experienced, but were intrinsic to it. The deeper I became involved in the practice of painting the stronger my objections towards traditional accounts of painting became, and in two main ways. First, these theories appeared excessively intentionalist. They assumed that painters work with far more fully formed intentions as to what they are trying to do and how they are going to do it than is actually the case. They thereby distort the whole process by which a painting is produced, as well as therefore the nature of the finished painting that results from this process. Second, the particular nature of painting as an activity seemed largely ignored. For instance, the nature of the materials the painter uses and the different plastic elements such as colour, light and texture realised through these materials and with which he actually works are hardly ever discussed. And yet these are the very elements of painting, and it is simply not possible to gain a correct understanding or appreciation of the finished article that results from the activity of painting without a proper understanding, for instance, of the precise way a painter works with the materials and plastic elements. It is my aim to correct these failings by providing a detailed account of the nature of the practice of painting, in terms of the way this practice is experienced by those who engage in it. Thereby I hope to ground an understanding of the nature of the result of this engagement, the actual paintings painters produce, and of the ways they are viewed by viewers, when the way they see them is in terms of the way they are produced.

   This account is phenomenological¹ in that it attempts to describe the experience involved in working within this practice in a way that remains faithful to the way that experience is originally given. That said, phenomenology has nothing to do with what in analytic philosophy as well as counselling and psychology has come to be meant by a ‘phenomenological’ account of something, that is to say with describing ‘what it is like’ for the experiencer. This misunderstanding of the phenomenological turns it into an account of the subjective when one of the most basic tenets of most phenomenological writing is that the traditional distinction between the subject and object distorts the very phenomena it is meant to clarify and that a return to the phenomena requires it to be transcended. As we shall see later, central to my account of what is wrong with traditional accounts of painting is that they are couched in subject/object terms. Phenomenology, then, is concerned not with trying to describe experience from one angle or another, but to describe the way it is originally given as well as what is involved in it being given in this way, such that it has the nature it does, in all its richness. An example of a phenomenological approach to a question might clarify the way such an approach proceeds, and why it might be helpful here. According to Classical psychology our perceptual experience of the world is built up from patches of light that strike our retinas. Because light can only hit our retinas from in front of us, this would have the result that our perceptual experience of the world would only be of that segment of it that is before us, in rather the same way that it is when we look through a pair of binoculars. There would be an amorphously shaped area laid out in front of us in which an array of objects of equal significance would present themselves for our inspection. Around it, outside the angle of our vision, all would be shrouded in darkness.

   This account, as Merleau-Ponty showed, does not coincide with the phenomena of our perceptual experience as these are originally given to us.² It is true that if we focus on our perceptual experience in a self-consciously reflective manner it can appear as this account describes it. That is to say, if we cease simply to see and experience things, but stand back from this experience and start to reflect upon it on the fact that we are seeing and how we are, then we do have experience of a certain segment of the world appearing to be laid out in front of us for our inspection, in which each item seems of equal significance to the others, this segment being limited in breadth, bordered by a fuzzy area beyond which there is nothing. However, in everyday life, when we are not reflecting upon our experience but simply going with it, when we are attending to what we are seeing and not to the fact that we are seeing it nor how we are, this is not at all how it appears. In ordinary experience when we are going about in the world, for instance when we are walking down the street, we do not have the experience of seeing a segment of the world in front of us, but rather the world appears to stretch all around us. Our perceptual experience is primordially of ourselves as a body situated in a world, one that extends all around us, and through which we move. Even things that are behind us have a place within the phenomenal field of our experience. Furthermore, this field is no longer laid out indifferently in front of us for our inspection, but is the vital world in which we are moving and living and therefore in which some things have more significance than others. The nature of our experience as it is originally given prior to reflection, – what can be called pre-reflective experience, is thus quite different from the nature of our experience once we start to reflect upon it.

   Phenomenology, at least phenomenology as exemplified in Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception, whose goals and ontology are closest to my own, involves the attempt to describe the pre-reflective experience of everyday life. It seeks both to describe and unpack what is involved in the way we experience things in everyday life when we are just going with that experience, immersed in it. This experience can rightly be called the experience of everyday life, as it is in this way, experiencing the world through immersion in it, that we spend the vast proportion of our lives. It is often only when things are disrupted, as Heidegger pointed out, or when we are trying to understand something within our experience that we stand back and survey it as it were from the outside, in a way that gives rise to reflective experience. However, this is not how our experience is primordially and ordinarily given to us. Thus, prior to our experience of the world as we understand it reflectively, as a collection of objects ‘out there’ in the world, which we as a subject can stand back from and survey, is the realm of pre-reflective experience, in which we are always already within the world, immersed and lost in it. This realm remains hidden, in the main, precisely because it is pre-reflective. It is there before us almost all the time, but as soon as we try to capture it through reflection it is gone. But it is the original world of man’s inherence. The realm of pre-reflective experience is a vast one, and different phenomenological thinkers have sought to account for different aspects of it. Here I am concerned with that dimension of it that is involved in the practice of fine art painting, as manifested in the body of fine art paintings, both of past ages and present times, that we as a culture possess.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Sebastian Gardner for his constructive criticism of many of the arguments of this book when it was still a Ph.D. thesis; and I would like to thank Christopher Macann for his elucidation of several key issues of phenomenology and for his support and encouragement in preparing the final text of this book.