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Painting images

Now paint this!
Yesterday someone asked me to give a brief explanation of phenomenology. I referred to something she had said not ten minutes before.

She was describing how she was painting a scene in an Italian hill town the past week. The light on one wall made of black stone "gave the appearance" that it was blue or violet; and on some days the wall appeared in various shades of gray, red or brown. Regardless of the causes of the different appearances, her painting was intended to capture the colors as the wall appeared to her. Not as she knew it to be. Forget knowledge. Her focus and goal: What color is the wall today as I am painting it today?

Some viewers, she admitted, would not understand why she represented a black stone wall in shimmering tones of purple, but that is as it is, she said. She would have expressed her true perception of the thing as it is. Some would see it, others not. And by doing just that, a one-hundred percent accurate demonstration, she would feel she was completing herself in some important way.

I said phenomenology was like that.

What then is the demonstration? In her case, this painter-phenomenologist, that would be the painting. It would be the product of a way of seeing, a thing that tried to comprehend comprehensively what is, or was.

Thus "doing phenomenology," no doubt an overworked phrase, would be the practice of a way, or ways, of seeing resulting in an artifact/evidence given as a stand-in for the thing depicted itself. However, the two would not be the same. But what was seen in consciousness was the same as what was produced.

There must be some great satisfaction in getting the "it" right: To see what is as it is without interference. Life would be constantly "fresh woods and pastures new." Worth living, or the darker view, hiding from.

I got the strong sense that the constellation of actions that is painting a picture, broken down into steps, assumptions, practices, approach, etc., is doing phenomenology. So too with writing, its constellation of actions that comprises that complex performance. The product, well, that too is a stand-in for the thing depicted, and the thing depicted is what the writer has in imagination, whether related to external/physical stimuli or not, or purportedly the (physical?) thing itself.

The process of painting outlined for me was phenomenology; so too, I thought, but as yet not articulated completely or well enough, was the process of writing.

You see, when seeing, I see what I see which is related to what is there but is more accurately located inside here not out there. If I can be totally true and precise about that, what is out there, if there is a physical correlate, it will bear the strongest resemblance to what is accessible also to you. What I can give you is a painting or a description or a song or a something so that you can experience this image too. But I guess not exactly in the same way, etc.

Whew! What have I taken on?

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