The following 27 slides represent a powerpoint presentation that I gave to my winter classes in the US where I explored the notion of painting as enchantment. The notion that there is a “mood” or “extraordinary moment” or “state of being,” often described as a “thrill,” a “rush,” childhood “innocence,” or a sense of feeling “larger” that enables a painter to feel “more intensely alive” or “see beyond the ordinary,” has been talked about by painters for quite some time. The notion especially intrigued me ever since I achieved the ability to produce correct paintings that were dead on arrival, decades ago.

For example, Manet tells us that we are not painters unless we are “moved.” Monet reveals that his orientation as a plein-air painter turned on a “total-self surrender” before the “sensations” of nature, so much so that he tried his best not to see the thing (as a thing) before him. Cèzanne explains how nature talks to him, how he “vibrates,” and at times, “germinates” before the “sensations” of nature and “realizes” who he is. Renoir and Matisse emphasize how the expressive process is driven by various feelings and pleasures. Picasso, Baudelaire, and Henri, in this regard, make reference to the sense of wonder one experiences as a child. Mallarmè speaks of the virtue of feeling “pure presence.” Henri goes so far as to suggest that entering into this mood makes art “inevitable.”

It was with delight, then, that I found Jane Bennett’s (whom I’ve referenced before in this blog) thoughts on enchantment.[1] Although Bennett is not telling an art story but a story about the liveliness of matter and the “peculiar mood” of enchantment as it “erupts amid the everyday” in modern life, and especially as it relates to ethics, her descriptions of this peculiar mood, what might induce it, or what the experience might be like, struck me as instruction, reaching back across the decades: this is what you painters (as opposed to the writers) have been trying to say: “give greater expression to the sense of play;” “hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things;” become “enamored with existence;” stay in the “moment of pure presence;” and “you’ll discern details previously ignored.” Thus the powerpoint presentation (made into a video), before you now, contains a good deal of Bennett’s lush and nuanced use of language, unattributed, given that in the presentations I was able to explain Bennett’s contribution verbally.

One note of caution: Monet implored his followers to understand that  the “excitement and ecstasy” he expressed, or “his passion for nature,” was not rooted in some sense of a “fairyland.” Rather, he emphasized that the “joy” that he derived from painting was not separate from a kind of “torment.”[2]  Bennett, herself, suggests that the experience of enchantment is both one of feeling “charmed and disturbed,” one of feeling “wonder and unease.” We will come back to why enchantment, when it is engaged with other orientations of modern life, carries with it a touch of discomfort.

[1] Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, (Princeton University Press, 2001)

[2] Eugene Boudin (Monet’s primary teacher) and Edouard Manet both used precisely these same terms; namely, that “joy” and “torment” were linked.