2022
It is probably fair to say that 2022 is the year of my birth as a visual artist. Even though I started painting somewhat earlier, in March 2021, my output that year was mostly derivative and is of little interest. In 2022 I moved from Paris to Château-Thierry—a place that is much closer to the countryside and therefore more encouraging for original landscape work. My goals that year were modest:
- Get started with oils. Before I painted only in watercolors.
- Achieve authenticity and establish unity of life and art through painting things that surround me.
- Improve my drawing skills.
2022 was the year of numerous stylistic experiments, most of which I destroyed or painted over. As a (mostly) landscape painter at the time, I started from what I saw around me and then considered questions such as:
- Should I change the colors and if yes, how?
- Should I change the shapes and if yes, how?
- Should I change the texture of this or that area?
- Etc.
At first I would often give in to the temptation, but I always found that any deviation from reality was inferior to it, even when such deviations were tried and true and approved by the masters. The problem was this. An intentional deviation from reality (as perceived by the artist) means that the artist has a notion of artistic value that is different from accurate depiction of observable reality. This notion of artistic value is arbitrary unless it is justified 1. Arbitrary art is not good art. At the same time it was hard for me to justify any deviation from observable reality whatsoever because reality actually exists and in that sense its depiction is true (see e.g. correspondence theory of truth), while everything else is at best beautiful. It appeared preferable to identify artistic value with truth rather than beauty because truth is absolute and is not subject to devaluation or change. Granted, this conclusion seemed disappointing from the point of view of artistic originality, but at least there were no philosophical problems with it.
At first I worked mostly from photographs and it wasn’t until late November that I ventured for plein air oil painting which immediately proved not as difficult as I imagined (except on colder days) and very rewarding.
Finally, one approach I was playing with that year is direct painting, that is, painting right away without any sketches and starting from the parts that attract most attention instead of following “the rules of the medium”. This gradually developed into the idea that the way painting is done is just as important as the end result. After a while I put this approach on hold since it was much more difficult and required a lot of concentration. In 2023 I returned to the idea of direct painting and integrated it into real realism.
- While this is an accurate account of my thinking at the time, I have now reconsidered this stance. I see the world as completely deterministic and my view on free will is that of a compatibilist. This calls for a different definition of the word “arbitrary”. Nothing is truly arbitrary in a fully deterministic universe, but then the word “arbitrary” is not very useful. A useful definition for “arbitrary” could be “chosen in a way where the choosing agent delegated the choice to a process outside of its control.” Even though this can sometimes happen in art, the decision itself to employ such a process is also a choice and it is itself hardly arbitrary. In general though, art (good or bad) is determined by the artist. Therefore, it does not need to be justified any more than e.g. the character of the artist in question. This means that one should look for other criteria for what constitutes good art. ↩
18 artworks: 11 oils, 6 watercolors, and 1 other
