Painting is a mental activity
Painting means observing the world, breathing in all of its forms and colors and transforming that infinite variety into the most concentrated forms of thought. “Painting is a mental activity” (Leonardo da Vinci)
Abstracting a common basic structure from the fleeting aspect of each single thing enables the Dutch painter to represent the broadest range of variation without getting lost in the outward appearances of countless things that fragment the consciousness and prevent an overall vision. As Mondrian put it, “Art should express the universal.” Harassed as we are by the frenzied pace of life, we have lost the capacity to consider questions of greater breadth. We have reached the point of being ashamed to talk about universal issues.
These pages are also dedicated to those who truly believe that abstraction can be reduced to a superficial exploration of cold geometry for its own sake. This has, unfortunately, been the case with many, all head and no heart, the type Fausto Melotti referred to as “hardworking clerks of abstraction”.
A realistic or, if you prefer, a figurative artist, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, said: “It is not real truth that I must represent in the painting but ideal truth. The conflict of these two forms of truth in the mind of the artist who produces the work ensures that it will remain incomplete. Artists who stick too close to reality in their pursuit of truth fail to achieve their objective. It is through the sacrifice of real truth that ideal truth is attained.” This has always been so, in the painting of the ancient Egyptians as in Byzantine, medieval, and Renaissance painting. Every work of art is the creation of a finite field of relations that seek to evoke the far more complex and elusive relations perceived in the space of real life.
Every description we formulate of the world is a process of transposing the infinite physical reality into a finite series of mental constructs that we can use to observe, examine, and establish relations between different things around us.
Physical reality is to be understood both as the macrocosm outside us and as the microcosm out of which our very individuality is constituted.
It must, however, be remembered that these constructs are abstractions of the real phenomena, which are always far more complex than our ideas.
We have been aware ever since Immanuel Kant that we can know our representations of phenomena but not phenomena in themselves. Nevertheless, we identify our mental symbols with physical phenomena out of habit and take our ideas as reality for the sake of convenience. Every era and every civilization or culture has its own ideas about the reality of things. While we do our utmost to give precise shape to our ideas, things change slowly and we change with them.
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