Painting, Aesthetics of

‘Painting’ names both a practice and its products. Both practice and product can, but need not, be art. When painting is art, in what does its artistic interest lie? This is the question an aesthetics of painting seeks to answer. While that answer might be sought in features found in other arts, here we investigate whether painting is of distinctive interest, containing phenomena of artistic value not to be found in most, or perhaps any, other art forms.

As an art, the practice of painting forms a tradition, one finding its origin outside art, in the practice of making representational pictures by hand, in any of a wide range of media. To see if painting is distinctively interesting as art, we should begin with the distinguishing features of the mundane practice from which it emerges. One such feature is that the space within pictures shares the structure of space as we encounter it in vision. Perhaps this is what makes pictures distinctively visual representations, and what makes painting a visual art. And perhaps one source of painting’s interest, as art, is that it articulates visual phenomena for us: either the structure of seen space, or other aspects of our visual lives. A second feature of ordinary pictures is that, while they divide into meaningful parts, those parts mean what they do only because of the particular whole in which they figure: there is nothing like a vocabulary for picturing. The maker of handmade pictures must therefore each time make meaning anew, from the ground up. Carried over to art, this gives the painter an unusually broad domain in which to exercise technique and in which to manifest her individual style. In these respects she contrasts both with the literary artist, forced to begin from the conventionally fixed meanings of the dictionary; and with the photographer, whose technique and style are exercised solving problems a whole picture at a time. A third feature of representational pictures is that they exhibit duality: between vehicle and content, the marks and what is visible in them, syntax and semantics. While parallel dualities characterise all representational arts, another relatively distinctive feature of pictures is that both sides of this duality are grasped visually. This creates opportunities for interplay between the two facets of a particularly intimate kind, opportunities that the history of painting has explored in depth. Even so, perhaps the heart of an aesthetics of painting requires us to understand how this duality, though present in thought, is somehow transcended in experience. At least, that is the direction in which we are pushed by some of the most striking and fundamental pictorial effects: for instance, the beauty of a painted hand, or the horror of a depicted bombing.

Painting may begin in representational picturing, but it ends in abstraction. To accommodate abstract painting in our aesthetics, two strategies are available. One is to note that much abstract painting, though not figurative, nonetheless involves pictorial space; depictive content (albeit relatively thin in form); and duality between the marks and what is visible in them. To such painting the ideas above apply without strain. Some painting, however, eschews representation too thoroughly to permit handling this way. For these works, a different strategy is required. They count as painting in virtue of calling into question the most basic assumptions around which the tradition of painting has been built. By omission, isolation, or exaggeration, they thematise fundamental features of previous painting. There are limits to how far such critique can go, and this is one source of the not infrequent proclamations of the death of painting. However, painting’s death should be distinguished from its end, its ceasing to be from its ceasing to develop. Proclamations of either can easily be premature. And, whatever the future holds, painting’s past will remain, as will the need to reflect on its achievements, not just with the specificity appropriate to art criticism, but with the generality only philosophy can provide.