I've been re-reading Crispin Sartwell's
Six Names of Beauty this week... it's a thoughtful and insightful treatise on the nature of the beautiful, and it should be required reading for all artists. In the chapter on "Sundara" (the Sanskrit word for beauty which translates more closely to "holiness"), Sartwell writes the following on perception:
"The alchemist Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (usually referred to as Paracelsus) wrote this:
'The inner stars of man are, in their properties, kind, and nature, by their course and position, like the outer stars... For as regards their nature, it is the same in the ether and in the microcosm, man... Just as the sun shines though a glass - as though divested of body and substance - so the stars penetrate one another in the body... For the sun and the moon and all planets, as well as all the stars and the whole chaos, are in man.'
This is, in general, conceived to be a 'magical' (prescientific, superstitious) view of the world. And so it is. But it also can be a read as a simple though poetic account of perception, saying that to see or hear something is to be penetrated by it, to let a piece of it into yourself through the medium of light or sound. It asserts a joining of ourselves and our universe through perception and hence an elaborate and continual complicating of the human self and human possibilities." (p.68-9)
That is one of my favorite passages. The search for visual harmony is always spiritually and emotionally enlightening. There is a certain satisfaction in being able to replicate reality, in having the necessary skills to create a convincing depiction of space. But the real growth, for me, as a perceptual painter, is not in mere depiction but in the transformation that occurs as a result: "to let a piece of [the perceived] into yourself." That is what I find so compelling about Morandi, and why I am constantly drawn to the mundane for subject matter - there is so much to see and so much potential to be transformed by it.
