In connection with prompt 3 in 10/19's journal on Dewey ... Prompt below ... then links ... then image:
(3) Painting’s Color: Consider and write the following:
Consider: Dewey writes: “in ordinary perceptions, this medium of color is mixed, adulterated. While we see, we also hear; we feel pressures, and heat or cold. In a painting, color renders the scene without these alloys and impurities. They are … squeezed out and left behind in an act of intensified expression. The medium becomes color alone, and since color alone must now carry the qualities of movement, touch, sound, etc., … the expressiveness and energy of color are enhanced” (pp.214-215).
Consider: Jean-François Lyotard (of whom we read “What is Postmodernism?” on the sublime, pp.559-564) wrote extensively about color in the paintings of the contemporary Californian artist Sam Francis, characteristically remarking about his work: “The gesture of painting defers to the authority, the absolute, almost giddy confidence that colours have in themselves” (Lyotard, Sam Francis: Lessons of Darkness…like the paintings of a blind man…, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Venice, CA: The Lapis Press, 1993), 6th plate).
Write: your free reflections on color in paintings--e.g., think about how do you describe the expressiveness, energy, giddiness of color?, does color come most alive in painting?, what are the possibilities and limits of color?, what is the meaning of color itself, as opposed to specific colors?, are they most important in painting as an activity, as a thing, as what we experience in such art?, etc.?
Consider: However, Sam Francis is most known (and Lyotard most interested in him) for his abstract minimalist paintings that predominately feature bare white centers with color pushed to the edges of the canvas. Considering Sam Francis’ “Not All I See Is There” (1969, Private Collection), an 8’x10’ acrylic on canvas that has long streaks of color, red, purple, green, brown, rimming the work in a thin band with crisp edges while the upper right and lower left have bands that cross diagonally down, violating the pure white interior of the work, Lyotard wonders: what if the white was the painting?, and proposes: “There, there was no this or that. When it is bold enough to try and get beyond, sucked in by the void, by utopia and uchronia, suddenly without beyond, without tomorrow or yesterday, the gaze finds itself stripped of its separative power. But it is also freed from the vanity of grasping. It discovers that ‘There is’ is not all that it sees, not all I see is there. It practices seeing where it can’t see, when the visible is not there. It stops looking. Something then is seen. Through colours, the eye advances into the white of its deliverance, and this white is also the night of its infirmity” (Ibid., 13th plate). (See below for this work and similar ones).
Write: after thinking about Dewey’s ideas on color, exploring pictures of Sam Francis’ paintings online, meditating on Lyotard’s question about the white and reflection on Francis’ painting, now, write: do you think that Lyotard captures Dewey’s “sensitivity to a medium as a medium [that] is the very heart of all artistic creation and esthetic perception” (p.217), that is, does he express the enhanced “expressiveness and energy of color” (p.215), why or why not, how or how not?