On Art - Voices - An Opening

[gxhpainter]

D Akey and Dr. Lima.. I was particularly attracted to this part of the quote:

Genius, then, consists, according to our explanation, in the capacity for knowing, independently of the principle of sufficient reason, not individual things, which have their existence only in their relations, but the Ideas of such things, and of being oneself the correlative of the Idea, and thus no longer an individual, but the pure subject of knowledge.

I find that as Elisabeth Gilbert also noted that the source of genius and creatiion lies outside and we can only "tune in" to become a receptor to it. For me the challenge, fun is exactly how to go about inviting that state ( short of drugs). Sometimes and mostly it is a walk in nature, or maybe a great glass of Scotch and cigar, or music or all of the above.. but primary is to simply sit down and start and be open... It is the "technical" side of art, the learning of the materials, techniques, art history that a good book or art school can be of aid to the artist in achieving what they are guided to do.

[Juz]

Dear Mr Akey, thank you for taking the time and thought that you put into your response to my post.

Unfortunately for me my philosophy and my ability are two seperate countries and i'm still looking for a mode of transport

[screenpainter]

Very interesting DA! I know exactly what you mean. It appears to be that way with many things in life. Sometimes we have to be backed into a corner with no place to go before we take on new adventures of change.

I checked out a book at the library this past week called "Seeing and Painting the Colors of Nature - An Impressionist's View. I checked it out mainly for the "Color" knowledge but as I read it and found out more about the author Joseph Dawley, the more interesting this book became. He was a realist painter who was struck with Parkinson's Disease. Loosing a lot of his fine motor skills he was forced into a style (Impressionism) that could handle less of the detailed painting. After a bit of recovery and surgery he managed to get most of his fine motor skills back but never went back to realism. I guess we never know where that road of life is going to lead us...

Thanks again for this excellent thread!

Thanks for the tip on the book, and some background on Dawley. Found one on Amazon and bought it.

[screenpainter]

@ Lima.
I appreciated the first Schopenhauer quote in blue about the artist allowing us to see through his eyes.
The one about genius, I was unable to comprehend. That figures.

[screenpainter]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ollection.html

I really don't understand why these spot paintings annoy me so much, but they have about as much soul as a linoleum floor for me. I mean, I can appreciate polka dots in art for sure, but this just comes across as a scam to me and I think I am pretty open minded about art.

[gxhpainter]

Albert...wheeeeew....I have been looking at a lot of Hard Edge type art lately but these make works of the California school seem down right wild and bushy.. and the whole premise behind them is pretty weak..IMO.. gee with a circle selection I could really go to town with this idea..I guess at the extreme end of abstraction you could get to the point where there is no artist or muse involved just a mechanical shape with some color no guessing as to artist intention, mental state or artistic capacity....pretty empty to me... glad you put the link on this thread..helps give a boundary to the ideas of abstraction if nothing more...

[screenpainter]

Albert...wheeeeew....I have been looking at a lot of Hard Edge type art lately but these make works of the California school seem down right wild and bushy.. and the whole premise behind them is pretty weak..IMO.. gee with a circle selection I could really go to town with this idea..I guess at the extreme end of abstraction you could get to the point where there is no artist or muse involved just a mechanical shape with some color no guessing as to artist intention, mental state or artistic capacity....pretty empty to me... glad you put the link on this thread..helps give a boundary to the ideas of abstraction if nothing more...

I have honestly seen better art work by Pantone.

[gxhpainter]

OK moving on... I ran across this interesting quote by Wayne Thiebaud in his book "Vision and Revision":
The mysterious process of painting and drawing has always used both construction and destruction with positive restuls. ' My pictures are often made by a sum of destructions,' Picasso declared. Putting in, taking out, adding and subtracting, stumbling around, glazing across, erasing, collaging upon, patching over, breaking and fixing can all be put to use as a work in being pursued.
This curious contradictory activity poses some interesting questions. When is a work finished? And how does that differ from work that feels complete?

I often find that I have created a little piece of painterly work or colored area that seems really good and wind up trying to work around it to the demise of the total work.. it takes some nerve to go after it to make to whole piece work.. I wonder how and if you come up against this problem ? how do you decide when there is nothing left to do and the work is completed...for me there is a sense of a completed statement like a music score the sounds complete. what of works that stop just short of that point? Is that a legimate stance as an artist to leave it an a seemingly unfinished state.. Obiviously there have been many artists and sculptors that employed that to great success although initially people complained..

[Lima]

Brilliant. That is very well stated.

The first paragraph, outside of the discussion of Visual Art for a moment, if you will indulge me - Dr. Lima, I am wondering whether that would cross over to the sciences like, in your case, Medicine? I have heard that Medicine is an Art, certainly it is a Science. But for the traditional practitioner who is dealing with something normal textbook, they would be less open to merely intuiting a diagnosis, or would they? In your career, how much were you free to leap to a conclusion? I imagine that diagnosticians were more in that category.

There is a TV show called House where the method they write into the script is that he and his team are geniuses given difficult symptoms to work with to find what is wrong with the patient. It's a mystery show basically. But what they do, based on their vast knowledge, is when they suspect a problem, they medicate in that direction to then watch what happens. So they do in fact proceed based on evidence. I assume that real medical people frequently do the same to some degree.

And I don't hear that Schopenhauer is talking about this category of scientific genius, in that he says:
“Genius, then, consists, according to our explanation, in the capacity for knowing, independently of the principle of sufficient reason, not individual things, which have their existence only in their relations, but the Ideas of such things, and of being oneself the correlative of the Idea, and thus no longer an individual, but the pure subject of knowledge.

How much of this kind of genius did you find applied to your work as a surgeon? And did your Artistic and Poetic interests balance the rigors you needed to adhere to in the Medical world?

I do find his comments fascinating. I especially appreciate the part you have in blue at the conclusion of the quote. Thanks for bringing this forward for us to read.

Sorry with this late response Akey. First Dr. House, OK/

We have around here, by cable tv, Grey’s Anatomy, House, Private Practice, and ER. I never see them because they don’t reflect real reality. http://media.dal.ca/?q=node/23

According to some opinions: In House the disease is the villain and the hero is a controversial, irreverent and anti-social doctor who trusts no one, least of all his patients. Only critically ill patients are reviewed by his team, always willing to find the cause of evil to save lives, whether through legal means or by use of nontraditional methods. I personally in my life never met someoane like him.


According with the writer of the series: “He’s an arrogant doctor who doesn’t like patients,” she says. “He thinks all of his patients lie, and he rarely touches them. He’s a jerk.”


Few professions depend on thinking as much as modern medicine does. Medicine has long been described as “an art based on science.”With the advancements in the last half of the 20th century, many would argue the scientific base of medicine is increasingly important. It is impossible to be scientifically based without thinking; as the science of medicine grows, so does the need to think clearly.More and more medical interventions are based on medical research—research that requires at least some ability to discern validity. As diagnostic tests and treatments multiply, clinicians and patients must choose the best course to follow from an ever-expanding list of possibilities. Good patient care requires careful and rational consideration of the alternatives.



Observe (you probably know this): “There are good, very good and excellent doctors… and bad doctors that think they are excellent”. I’m a surgeon. In this area, there is no in animali nobili experimenting and no space for error, you have to know how to do it.


W'll be talking about the genius later.
All the best

[Lima]

@ Lima.
I appreciated the first Schopenhauer quote in blue about the artist allowing us to see through his eyes.
The one about genius, I was unable to comprehend. That figures.

Who said I comprehend either!!! but sc here are some insightful sentences:

"Art, the work of genius. It repeats or reproduces the eternal Ideas grasped through pure contemplation, the essential and abiding in all the phenomena of the world; and according to what the material is in which it reproduces, it is sculpture or painting, poetry or music. Its one source is the knowledge of Ideas.

Art is everywhere at its goal for it plucks the object of its contemplation out of the stream of the world’s course, and has it isolated before it. And this particular thing, which in that stream was a small perishing part, becomes to art the representative of the whole, an equivalent of the endless multitude in space and time.

It therefore pauses at this particular thing; the course of time stops; the relations vanish for it; only the essential, the Idea, is its object.

We may, therefore, accurately define it as the way of viewing things independent of the principle of sufficient reason, in opposition to the way of viewing them which proceeds in accordance with that principle, and which is the method of science.

Thus genius is the faculty of continuing in the state of proportion of losing oneself in perception, and of enlisting in this service the knowledge which originally existed only for the service of the will ; that is to say, genius is the power of leaving one’s own interests, wishes, and aims entirely out of sight, thus of entirely renouncing one’s own personality for a time, so as to remain pure knowing subject, clear vision of the world ; and this not merely at moments, but for a sufficient length of time, and with sufficient consciousness, to enable one to reproduce by deliberate art what has thus been apprehended, and to fix in lasting thoughts the wavering images that float before the mind.

Genius, then, consists, according to our explanation, in the capacity for knowing, independently of the principle of sufficient reason, not individual things, which have their existence only in their relations, but the Ideas of such things, and of being oneself the correlative of the Idea, and thus no longer an individual, but the pure subject of knowledge."