I have been painting the ocean for the last few days. This does not mean that I am trying to lay color onto a big body of salt water. I have often been bemused by the flexibility of language and interpretation that allows us to understand what visual artists mean when they say they are painting something. Literally, this should mean that an artist is applying paint to the subject. Instead, it is easily and correctly interpreted as "using paint to create an image of a subject." The interpretation becomes more complex if the artist is putting paint onto a three-dimensional object. For instance, if the artist is applying paint to a chair in decorative colors, she is actually painting a chair, rather than creating an image of a chair. It would become surrealistically complex if she were to then paint the image of a chair on that very chair. Then she would be painting a chair², or painting a chair squared. And if the chair is rather evenly rectilinear, she is painting a square chair squared.

When I have just painted the ocean, the paint is wet. The ocean is wet, too, but not because my paint is wet. My paint will dry, but the ocean will not dry, at least not for a very long time. But when my paint is dry, the ocean will be dry too, at least in the verbal world of describing the process of art. Then I will start on another area, and the ocean will be wet again. But the real ocean is wet in all the parts where it is, from inlet to mid-Atlantic. If it is dry, then it is no longer the ocean.

This is what happens when you study mathematics and physics and art at the same time. I am working on beginning calculus, attending to the areas under curves between two designated moments in time displayed on the x-axis. Everything has to mean exactly what it should mean. You can't use artistic metaphors. This is why mathematical and physics types often take language extremely literally, even when it is meant figuratively, for example in the sense I referred to above about painting the ocean. The more math and physics I do, the more linguistically literal I get, which is why I notice things like the painting description. As a result I try to describe things in highly specific, non-ambiguous terms. I am painting an image of the ocean, in acrylic paint on illustration board. I am not painting the ocean.

It is not an accurate representation of the ocean. It is stylized and abstract. It is a dark blue wavy area, with a very straight horizontal line of demarcation, and a pale blue cloudy area above it. The whole painted rectangle is divided into geometric areas, formed by the intersection of many curved lines with one horizontal line. Yet it is unmistakably the image of the ocean and will be interpreted as such. Our human visual sense interprets this image as a familiar thing even when there is only limited evidence to go on. Even when a picture is totally abstract or even random, people will find patterns which they interpret as recognizable images in it. With abstract art, it is like physics. I am trying to reduce the infinitely complex, though simple-looking scene of the ocean and sky to an equation of shape and color. Yet it is not a mathematical graph. A shape under the line or curve of a mathematical graph does not translate into visual information which will immediately suggest movement to the viewer. You have to learn what the graph means; it needs more interpretation than the artwork. All oceans are wet, but not all math is literal and dry.

Posted at 4:01 am | link