Object in a Painting                                            

1.

From the abyss of the unknown flow out trillions of trillions of objects all baptized with the same bewildering insistence on being themselves. Faithfully, precisely, strenuously, painstakingly, each actualizes its own eidos.

Everything that is, lives. In the world that I see, everything comes alive. Some forms of life display an astonishing vitality and other forms lead measured lives of lasting. But everything is alive and therefore is dying. When I am painting a gutterspout, I think of the few fistfuls of matter that perhaps used to be part of some other object. I think of that other object’s fate; it now has become a drought-shriveled spout until the reviving rain will swell its gut plump. I think of how the droughts and monsoon periods shaped and misshaped that gutterspout and showed its life tale, and I think of how in time it will turn again into a few fistfuls of matter. Clearly there are forces in matter transforming things of the world into other things again, and yet other things, in an eternity of transubstantiations. They always live, and they always die, as distinct somethings.

I cannot give you the countenance of reality straight. That is for a biological illustrator or a photo-realist to accomplish. I am in love, and my painting has to be an ardent, passionate love-letter. Deep and holy is my pagan adoration. Hosanna to the fecund pond from which a pale flank of a maiden emerges! Hosanna to the rivulets of water glistening in the sun on the countenance of reality!

Matter described scientifically does not interest me while I am painting. What is of interest to me is a powerful depiction of being. What I observe is the phenomenologically rich manifestations of objects. The objects are brimful with success at being themselves. I learn from them. I observe their fullness of being and I try to make that fullness emphatic and vivid in my work. Of course, all visions are about being. People cannot imagine visions that are not about being. We worship being. That is why paintings exist. They are tablets of prayers to being. Paintings resound through eloquent, silent antiphonies in response to experiences of being.

   2.

A painter’s intent to describe leads him to ask: what to show? What qualities should he make emphatic? I think of objects that are already installed in a view I am showing and I ask myself: is this object and its situation merely executed to the extent of being recognizable? That seems insufficient and weak. Instead, I want to make of that object a legend.

Its legend grows out of an inspired, raw and amplified phenomenological inquiry into the pulsating, blinking, perspiring existence of an object. This inquiry often yields revelatory discoveries about the life of objects. We have admired it in poetry; we have on occasion found it in painting as well. (An object’s “legend” differs greatly from its myth. A myth is handed down like the idea of a triangle- an impersonal inheritance.)

A legend of a bicycle is that it is very insectile and therefore manifestly exoskeletal. Once that realization comes to you, then you would want to rush back to the easel and repaint the bicycle there. Nabokov saw, in “Bend Sinister,” the taillight of a bicycle as an “anal ruby.”

   3.

A painting must amalgamate two things. A painting incorporates both, its vision and its parts. For a vision you look inside. For parts you should look outside, because parts consist of appearances. A vision is an apparition, a ghost too spectral for this world. To firm it in a painting, it has to be clad in appearances. One has to become a visionary on one hand and a master of appearances on the other--a William Blake that ate Willem Kalf, an Odillon Redon that consumed Hans Holbein.

If metaphysician’s mind wants to go beyond the appearances and inquire about true nature of things I don’t want to follow. I want to stay where appearances are. They promise a much jollier party. If things really are hiding behind appearances then let them; at least appearances are not cowering in front of objects. They spread themselves lavishly and boldly, welcoming closer scrutiny. And the show is breathtaking.

The object has its own truth. Most likely it also connects to some overwhelming universal truth-- which would then, of course, have to hold true for all objects and beings. I have no access to it. The chasmal, abysmal disproportionality between the rickety caboose of my enterprise and the Truth is such that I rapidly and tightly pull my ratty blanket over my head to declare my redoubled dedication to the human un-truth. Let us re-embrace the human un-truth, the face of our mother, which is the nourishing oasis of local meaning. Let us take sustenance from the human legend where we see the sun as our home star, rather than as a cauldron of boiling hydrogen.

All that frantic movement! The day is zipping by as if a freight train were barreling right past my windowpane. It feels as dislocating as being a passenger of an elevator that does not stop at any level but keeps going up and up in a blur of half-seen corridors and faces, half understood shouts and warnings. Heraclitus’s “everything flows” (”Panta rei”) was not a statement but a complaint. Yet it all subsides, comes to a thankful halt in front of a painting. An island of respite, of repose, of the mercy of motionlessness. Come and let us get very quiet. Let’s cherish the lasting; it is another kind of timing. It is the timing of lichens, it is turtles’ time.

     4.

Lines in a painting indicate only a decorative intent, one of the planimetric pleasures foreign to my task as a painter. Lines belong to that arctic world of geometry where Euclid, with his abstracting skates, cuts the shortest distance between two points with one frozen line. Painting has hatched in warmer climes and escapes the tyranny of geometry. A painter replaces the arbitrariness of those lines with the eventfulness of the edge, with the rich life of the contour. What a difference between a line, which is dead, and a contour, which is alive! The contour is always a three dimensionality; it is fully immersed in the fecund and corrosive pond of reality.

To the extent that I have left some lines in my painting and not turned them into contours, to that grievous extent, I have failed as a painter of illusion. I have neglected to insist to the utmost on perfectly transmuting everything in the painting into a seamless illusion. Like a distracted monk that allowed some orthographic mistakes to smudge a copy of the sacred text, my copy too has been desecrated by my shameful distraction.

. 5.

Objects in the image, I believe, should appear as if there was no paint used in their making. Paint has to stay on the palette. On the panel, on the canvas, only elements of powerful illusion can be present, illusion clean of any hint or smudge of the leftover greasy muck.. To me, paint on the canvas is an abomination. A taste for paint on the canvas encouraged thick, turbid smearing, and produced work painful to look at. Painting is not at all like anarchic cake decorating. Painting should appear to us from behind a glossy surface of a mirror.

 6.

I ask any of the objects in my paintings: are they shown in their splendor? Is their rendering expressing the utmost of their being? Or is it, perhaps no more than a poor, mean mere substitution, a stand-in for itself? If so I need to go back there, mentally first removing that object from its surroundings and carry it away to get better acquainted, to learn more intimately the thick phenomenology of intuited possibilities that this object radiates. For example: what would it look like if fed on fertile yeasts and broth of revitalizing marrow juices?

I direct my effort to serve the initial vision I had. In the process I bring in props, models, sights, circumstances that are going to be helpful in building a strong, convincing air of necessity in that image. All of these elements have overpowering, nearly blinding content of their own that at times contaminates, occludes my own vision.

Tendentiously I pick out those qualities and elements that belong to my legend and suppress the rest, which swarms with extraneous content. I bend the truth; I select, exaggerate, and oversimplify, because I believe that painting is a kingdom of emphatic states.

I ask: what exactly is the connection between this object and the ground from which it thrusts forth? Is it standing lightly, barely using the ground to moor itself, or is it deeply dug in, rooted by crushing gravity, socketed in, like a tooth in a jowl? Is the area of connection so neutral that the ground and the object have nothing in common, like two names listed under each other in a phone book? On the other hand, perhaps the connection is so significant and rich in effects that there is a cross-contamination, a commingling, a fine cross-colonization. Also: to what extend do I want to emphasize the separate, fully developed, surprising thingness of an object? The separateness of a thing could be graduated; its degree of apartness could be so emphatic that it would result in a sense of dramatic, ringing, resounding superimposition. On the other end of possibilities, things hardly accentuate their separation, like knobs or knots on driftwood. These things are separate from the ground from which they thrust forth but they are also intensifications, thickenings of the ground. Yet, they are more than just “more of it”-- they are quickenings, they are culminations, peaks of content.

  7.

The maw of darkness pours endlessly onto the cosmic nets worlds of forms, worlds of objects as if they were trillions upon trillions of sparkling diatoms tumbling into vast heaps, gathering and growing. There amidst black wastelands of contentless bleakness you can see those tall pyres pulsating with energetic forms, cartwheeling huge furnaces out of smoking gasses of birth. Flaming fists emboss acorns of worlds on an outstretched mummy-cloth of the ultimate vastness.

The powerful will-to-be expresses itself in spectacular, prodigious becoming. Forms, forms everywhere. Forms in all directions. Forms inside of forms, forms upon forms, forms ingesting forms. There is no cosmic dandruff here, being pressed into matrices, but rather some immense cosmic kaleidoscopes like super-galactic windmills churning and milling new forms out of old ones. Yet they always remain formfull in the eternal process of patterning and repatterning, forming and reforming. Cosmos favors pluralism. The ultimate catalogue of eidos, if it were ever actualized, would be so unfathomably staggering that there would have to be another universe to contain it.

Henryk Fantazos