I’ve always hated theories…My only quality is to have painted directly from nature…. – Monet

As for the colors I use, what’s so interesting about that? – Monet

My teacher, Bill Schultz, was as gentle a teacher as one could find. But when he demonstrated, questions about color use would drive him up the wall. Once, when asked what color he was using, he responded uncharacteristically tersely: “If you were listening to a concert pianist, would you ask what note he had just played?” Why would one of the gentlest and supportive teachers of all time snap at a student asking about color?

Questions about color are understandable; why wouldn’t I want to know what colors someone uses so that I may achieve similar results? But notice how quickly answers to such questions create problems. For example, I could respond by saying, “With dark pine trees I use ultramarine blue with a touch of deep cadmium yellow. Or, in blue skies I generally add a bit of quinacridone.” The student, then, is apt to go out and mix the “correct” color but in so doing she wouldn’t be feeling the colors. Instead she would be thinking the colors. The danger here is that the process, so wonderfully articulated by the Impressionists as one driven by sensation, would be transformed into a formulaic production process, driven by thought. The life-giving experience where one truly learns to see beyond the ordinary could possibly be lost. This is sacred ground. As Picasso once said about making love to a beautiful woman, “You don’t begin by measuring her arm.” We don’t begin seeing color by recalling some mixture someone else used in an entirely different setting! Here’s a better way of asking someone about color use. “How do you see those colors?”

Robert Henri reminded us that the point of making a picture is not to make a picture. And why? Because for him, the crucial endeavor, beyond all else, was to visually get into an “extraordinary moment.” So many great painters keep coming back to the same point:

Manet: you first have to be moved.

Picasso: I do nothing except for pleasure.

Hawthorne: find something that makes you “tremble.”

Monet: “I’ve simply looked at what the universe has shown me, to bear witness with my brush.” And later, “It’s a total self-surrender.” And so often, “It’s all about the sensation.”

Or Cézanne: “I vibrate with nature.” Or his wife noting, “He would halt and look at everything with widened eyes, ‘germinating’ with the countryside.”

What are these artists suggesting? What’s going on?

Painting On Oak Street, San Francisco, 1998, by Jerry Fresia

Moments of Enchantment

Based upon my own experience, I would say that these artists are suggesting that nature is speaking to them and then, with their brushes, the artists are speaking back. They seem to be one with the subject. Think about that for a moment: to be one with something means to be entangled with something, to be drawn in or even captured by that something. This oneness, this capturing, may be thought of as moments of enchantment. Have you noticed the reversal that I’m suggesting here? Typically, commentators will say about Impressionists, “They wanted to capture the fleeting moment.” Or, “They wanted to capture the light.” But this is crazy. Why not capture butterflies? Or wild animals? Or escaped convicts? Such explanations make no real sense. First, I get a big net and then I run around capturing things. Why? I don’t know, I just do.

Notice what happens when we prioritize and pay attention to what happens to the artist in this process: for example, we could say that Monet, et al, were captured by the light. They were moved by the sensations of the moment. It gave them joy. The sense of wonder gave them pleasure. At least if we frame the moment or the capturing this way, it begins to make sense, doesn’t it? Oh, I see why someone would do that. It sounds like fun. Like joy. Like wonder. If I paint in this tradition, then, maybe I should be thinking more about the ways I might get into that joyful state, that state of being captured. I get it.

Here’s what happens to me: sometimes when I go out to paint – not always, but sometimes – and often midway into my two-hour outdoor session (generally), I find that I have drifted into a different state of being. Little sparkling colors begin to appear. I don’t want to confuse you: these are really tiny hints of color, very subtle, kind of like those “sprinkle” things people put on cakes. Tiny, tiny bits of color sprinkled around, that vibrate, that appear and disappear. Little tiny bright flashes. I only see them when I’m carried away, so to speak, when the visual sensations – line, tone, and color – capture me. And when this happens, I feel capable (more powerful?) and in the painting stage, in the proper order, I begin to paint them, one by one – here, there, everywhere. I feel good, alive – connected to something. Nothing else matters, and to put a fine point on it, if someone came up to me at that moment and said, “I will give you a Porsche of your choice in exchange for your ability to be captured by the sprinkles,” I would say, “Please. You’re going to break the spell.”

Now, believe it or not, there is much written on this subject – the seeing matter as affective in western philosophy, which is suggestive, given that we can then connect many of these thoughts to the ways of thinking that shaped the approach to painting found in Paris toward the end of the 19th century. A recent book that discusses this sort of thing is Jane Bennett’s, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics.[1]

Let me conclude this way: I will explain to you how to see color (and line) in a way that has zero to do with mixing colors or color theory by offering four suggestions. Everything in italics is the language of Bennett; she’s not writing about art or painting, but rather the way matter has been understood to be affective. But to borrow her language is a great way to talk about entering into the realm “that makes art possible” (Henri).

Suggestion #1: Look to be charmed or captured by or enamored with existence. We need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism; that is, the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature. Painting (as opposed to production which turns on external evaluations) requires that we experience moments of pure presence, conditions of exhilaration, caught up and carried away, so that our mood is one of fullness, plenitude, or liveliness. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example, noted this liveliness when he argued that Cézanne wanted “to make visible how the world touches us (Ponty’s emphasis).”[2]

Suggestion #2: Develop deliberate strategies so that you become sensitive to the visual sensations erupting amid the everyday. For example, cultivate an eye for the wonderful. Hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things. Give greater expression to the sense of play. Find ways to create a fleeting return to childlike excitement about life.

Suggestion #3: Long to become otherwise. We aren’t encouraged to feel color (or line) because it’s not a priority in our way of life. There’s no external reward for it; certainly not in contemporary art where language has displaced “the sensation.” Therefore, we must step outside that world. We must extend the limits of [our ] current embodiment; escape the confines of biography, culture, training, [and] expand the horizon of the conceivable. Open to an enhanced capacity to identify exits, escapes, passages. Art that liberates, it seems to me, is co-mingling, straddling two realms of being.

Suggestion #4: Think of the activity of painting not as a way of making an object but as a state of interactive fascination that propels us into a crossing, a metamorphosis, a becoming. To become is not to achieve a final state of being; it is to give more of a chance to that which rumbles in you, but you are not. At least not yet. “As for the colors I use, what’s so interesting about that?”

[1] Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics, (Princeton University Press, 2001). Bennett is responding to critiques of modernity as “disenchanted,” an understanding most often associated with Max Weber. Bennett makes quite clear that her interest in “sites of enchantment” has nothing to do with “new age” spiritualism or theism. Rather she is interested in what may be thought of as the agency of matter itself and the way in which the experience of enchantment is related to ethics. To wit, she positions herself vis-a-vis a number of theorists, past and present, whose work makes contact with her understanding of the “liveliness” of matter. [2] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” p. 7; http://faculty.uml.edu/rinnis/cezannedoubt.pdf