2024

This year started with disillusionment with respect to real realism as defined in the essay published in January 2024. Pretty much as soon as the essay was finished it became clear that many ideas outlined in it needed more thorough philosophical treatment. For example:

• What exactly is a non-trivial intention? What is the criterion for “non-triviality”?
• What exactly is the real realist intention (RRI)? When can we say that a perceptual experience is aligned with the RRI?

It soon became obvious that painting could not be a medium for implementing the RRI, since the RRI had to be defined as attending to reality for its intrinsic value rather than for its extrinsic value. This is a particularly subtle issue to tackle, but suffice it to say that when painting, one does not attend to reality for “its own sake” but in order to make a picture. There can be no “escape hatch” in this question. If that is so, what should we do in order to implement the RRI? The solution, it seems, is to work on a completely different approach which has little to do with art as it is usually understood. I call this approach perception routines and hope to publish a new essay on the matter in the coming months (likely January 2025).

In addition to philosophical development of real realism which effectively eliminated it as an artistic approach, I found myself too constrained in my painting practice by what I stipulated in the aforementioned essay. In other words, spring finally came and it became difficult to keep painting purely real realist works that aim to make a certain point. Instead, I found myself painting a more traditional kind of landscapes and enjoying nature. Besides, making a point with art by virtue of doing something not entirely common became almost an intention of its own, and a trivial one at that, since most artists strive to make something that “stands out”. My attitude to this was to relax and enjoy spring.

At the end of spring I started to have serious doubts about how to continue with painting so I put it aside pretty much till August and shifted my attention to photography. Photography for me means exclusively film photography, since the digital medium cannot possibly convey what I observe in the world—it is too sterile and the results are always unsatisfactory. I believe I made significant progress with development of my aesthetic via photography this year and extended my usual range of subject matter.

In August my interest in painting started to rekindle, but changes had to be made. Once I had (re)defined the RRI I faced once again the question of what kind of considerations should drive my painting practice. Perception routines grew into a separate branch of research that had nothing to do with visual arts and hence it could not be used to inform the latter. Abandoning painting completely was never an option for me. I have to admit that I simply love the craft, and yet it would be self-indulgent and lazy to practice it for its own sake and without an intellectual discipline.

In my rethinking of painting I took the following as axioms:

• I want to treat painting as a form of meditation, therefore it has to be done alla prima in under 2 hours of time while directly observing the subject. No subsequent corrections are allowed, one has to accept the result as it is.
• I want to paint what I find around me without inventing or embellishing anything. Even traveling to a special location is not an option.
• I do not want to use any tricks in order to impress anyone or stand out.

I had to accept that there is a certain aesthetics that my works have and that I want to cultivate. One way to define this aesthetics is to say that it is anti-escapist. On this view, material reality is the only art-worthy subject not because the artworks that are derived from it are more interesting or beautiful, but because it is the only subject that we can perceive with our senses and interact with directly. This mode of interaction is a privilege, hence it deserves to be valorized through art. Besides, it is always fun to go against the general mass of people, and that mass nowadays is escapist; it is turning away from material reality and towards the realm of carrier reality, primarily through the medium of the Internet.

Now, a few words need to be said about purely technical adjustments to my process. Those seemed to be necessary in order to shake things up. Sometime in July-August I decided to change the way I prepare canvases. As usual, I was after a more organic and natural look but without having to compromise on my rapid and simplistic alla prima approach. So, the new approach was to cover a canvas with an interesting and varying underpainting (not a single flat tone) and even add a bit of impasto here and there. The underpainting was supposed to make thin oil layers on top get that micro-variation that makes them look less flat, all without having to vary the tones “manually” for the most part. The underpainting also makes the whole picture more material and solid. As for the impasto part, it would have a life of its own, completely disconnected from what later would be painted over it. In retrospect I think it represents a kind of resistance on the part on the canvas. That resistance is desirable because it helps to produce more complex dynamics in the work.

During the actual painting process I found myself dedicating more attention to matching colors of the world around me more precisely and using less obvious and more varied brushstrokes. At its core though, my painting process remained simple, which does show in the end, but the results are now a bit more natural.

The last component to this painterly renaissance was some fresh imagery that my photographic work provided and that I could not dare to directly approach as a painter (think grass, weeds, and other unremarkable elements that can nevertheless be challenging to paint). I found that this new imagery spoke to me and provided metaphors for many things, even for political catastrophes of today that are nearly impossible to tackle in art.

80 artworks: 42 photographs, 33 oils, and 5 others