Sydney Photos and Heavy Art Books
Comments OffHere’s a few holiday pics from my recent Sydney trip where I went to see PJ Harvey at the Sydney Opera House. I also saw a few exhibitions, but nothing that really dropped my jaw. My most exciting art moment was buying three art books (two Anselm Kiefer books and one Brett Whiteley book). The books were so big and heavy that I almost lost my arms while dragging them back to the hotel, but they were worth the struggle.. even if they did almost kill me.
I have always drawn more inspiration from art books, which is partly because Australia is so far from the art of Europe or America, but also because I can’t relax as much as I would like to at a busy exhibition in an art gallery.
This is a painting by the German artist Anselm Kiefer at the Art Gallery of NSW.
Here’s a triptych by the American artist Cy Twombly, also at the Art Gallery of NSW. There’s also another Anselm Kiefer painting in the distance.
This is the Sydney Opera House where I went and saw PJ Harvey in concert.
A look back at Sydney city from the Opera House.
These are some paintings by the Sydney painter Ken Done at his own art gallery. I don’t think he is taken very seriously by the art establishment, whatever that is, but I have always liked his work. He does a lot of very commercial stuff which turns a lot of people off but I still like him. They’re just happy, colorful paintings that don’t have to be thought about.. which can be a good thing.
The nature of intellectual aesthetic experience
Comments OffI am a painter with a background in mathematics. I paint what has come to be known as ?math paintings?. It is one of those unfortunate terms that will dog me forever that say so little about my work. But I do paint with mathematics. I spend months developing complex mathematics related to the subject I choose to paint. I get passionately involved with mathematical definitions, theorems, proofs and numbers that I find exciting and beautiful and that describe a certain aspect of my chosen subject matter e.g. beauty if I am painting faces of women. Once I am done with the research, I use the resultant outpouring of mathematics to paint. I literally paint with mathematics. There is often very little on my canvas that is not painstakingly constructed using layered equations, numbers and symbols.
Why do I do this? I have spent years working with mathematics and I am familiar with the excitement that a good piece of mathematics can generate. There are some proofs and theorems and geometrical objects that I find exceptionally beautiful and I have often experienced a racing of pulse when I stumble upon a great mathematical solution. My reaction to my mathematics is often more intellectual than it is emotional. When I call my mathematics beautiful, I have an aesthetic experience which I choose to call an intellectual aesthetic experience (IAE). An intellectual aesthetic experience is intellectual and is elicited by the mind?s experience of an intellectual object. I paint to construct conduits to tap onto this experience. My paintings and everything that goes into making them are special purpose vessels of the IAE. Does that make any sense?
But why mathematics? Scientific theories can be beautiful. Engineering systems are often referred to as aesthetically pleasing. (Much of what you see in Biennales around the world today appeal chiefly to the IAE, in my opinion). Also, mathematics is not a spectator sport and too many people are turned off by it, thanks largely to our education systems.
To answer this question, I want to spend the rest of this article to talk about the special place that mathematics occupies beside aesthetic experience. First, consider the famous question - ??How are synthetic judgments apriori possible?? which begins Kant?s Critique of Pure Reason. Kant proposes that the objective validity of mathematical knowledge rests on the fact that it is based on the apriori forms of our sensibility which condition the possibility of experience. If we have apriori conditions to sensibility, then we have knowledge that is more than just logical. If we say, ?It is either snowing or not snowing? we have an analytic proposition. An analytic proposition is about logical relations and not empirical facts. Its truth rests on definition and logic alone. Empirical knowledge on the other hand is synthetic. It tells us more than mere logical relations. For the special case of apriori synthetic knowledge that is independent of experience, we can have knowledge (more than just logic) without experiencing it. Mathematics is this special case of synthetic apriori knowledge. Mathematics, according to Kant is based on the preconditions of experience itself. So, mathematics is closer to the way we experience than we might like to think.
But in the last 200 years, the above apriori synthetic/analytic boundary was challenged by the introduction of non-Euclidean geometry, as well as Turing?s halting and Godel?s incompleteness theorem. With non-Euclidean geometry for instance, apriori synthetic truth is revealed as simply a logical possibility. And if apriori synthetic truths condition the possibility of experience, experience itself becomes malleable. Once we learn the new preconditions, we are free to change the way we experience, altering its very definition. We see here the finitude of Reason, the central theme to Kant?s philosophy. Nature does not speak to Reason. The ?other? is mute. Reason is not the mirror reflecting the light of Nature. We know this because it is incompatible with the very essence of empirical science ? that we cannot conduct experiments independent of context. The power of human Reason is not in its universality but in articulating its own boundaries against non-Reason. Mathematics is a special form of dialogue between Reason and the ?other ?( non-Reason) and Mathematics allows the ?other? to reveal its authoring otherness. Mathematics thus becomes a true counterpart to poetry in that both seek ways to transcend the radical finitude of Reason. Aesthetic experience therefore is a constitutive component of human rationality.
I have outlined (too briefly) how mathematics and aesthetic experience might be related. I hope to continue in part II with an in depth discussion on the nature of the IAE.
Created by Rajinder Singh On 02/21/08 At 10:19 AM
Monday Morning Mashup #2
Comments Off“A Pirate of the Caribbean”, 8″x10″ mixed media collage SOLD
The Night Shift - painting every day, after dark….Check in every weekday for a new work of original art.
Echoes of the Big Bang? [part 1]
Comments Off 
Imagine a film projected on a screen. An artist, a painter, toils away at his latest canvas, the camera follows the strokes of the brush in close-up and pans-out to encompass his hand, then his arm and finally his whole body dancing around as he works. It is at this point that we understand that the action proceeds in reverse: the gestures undo what was done, the paint flows back into the brush, and the artist takes a step back; his arm briskly leaving the point of what had been first contact; and ponders what was about to become the next step. We see intensity in the artist?s expression and the camera homes-in on one of his eyes and dives deep inside.
Sometimes I catch myself visualizing the possibility of this happening. Maybe we all do without being fully aware of it most of the time: in those moments when we ponder, we do, and we undo countless times in our heads until we release the hand. It has little to do with hesitation, though hesitation lives somewhere next-door, and even the most immediate artist goes through this doing and undoing ? thousands of permutations are tested at blitz-speed.
What the camera zooms-in on is on creation ? not the object, but the energy. Somewhere beyond the iris everything sizzles and sometimes, amidst this sizzling, a spark is released. A spark that connects us with another, more distant and still unfathomable spark that once set all that surrounds us in motion. The camera doesn?t have to show us all of this, that would be too cumbersome and too revealing. The point of the exercise and of the film, as with Art, should be to take the viewer to a place or a situation where he finds himself asking his own questions and finding the answers that he is made to see in the sizzling activity he discovers within himself.
Nowadays, regrettably, the trend lies toward instant gratification of all senses and thus the negation and denial of the possibility of a deeper experience of self-discovery, which, in my opinion, is something that is an inalienable aspect of creation, especially of what artistic creation should be. Instead, the paradigms we have instated are: ?Shock them into oblivion, don?t let them think too much, give them all they want, because that will keep them happy?; coupled with: ?I want what everybody else wants because that way they will all believe that I am happy?. Thus the surface of the canvas ? as all other surfaces in Life ? is littered with an abundance of flotsam and jetsam to hold on to and avoid sinking-in too deep or flying too freely. What we are left with is a contradiction in terms: Empty Aesthetics.
But because I don?t fancy finishing on such a dark tone we could end this short movie [no more than 2.45 min.] thus: as we zoom-in on the iris we watch the last remnants of what the artist perceives on the outside fade-out, and for a few brief seconds we are left in darkness and silence. Then, deep inside and still in silence, we watch a tiny speck of light explode and expand in slow-motion into a multitude of colours? and the last frames we?ve got left to watch bring into focus an image reminiscent of the painting the artist is currently working on.
What will emerge? Will the artist be capable of transmitting that spark or will he settle for flotsam and jetsam? Will he succeed in completing his portion of the cycle? Or was it all just a fancy idea for a short video?
Created by Jose Freitas Cruz On 02/17/08 At 05:59 PM
Monday Morning Mashup
Comments OffA new feature of The Night Shift — I’ve been experimenting with collage. Many of my paintings never see the light of day but have some remarkably beautiful elements within that I hate to discard….
The Night Shift - painting every day, after dark….Check in every weekday for a new work of original art.
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