I use the term Open Image to describe an approach to painting that accepts as a matter of course the unpredictability of viewers’ responses. I never really thought of myself as an abstract painter. By painting monochrome all those years, I think I only avoided specific figuration in order to emphasize painting’s physicality and to keep the image as open as I could to the possibility of a primary experience. Avoiding imagery, however, I was filtering, narrowing down the range of elements the viewer would juggle in order to see. This method is a matter of selective emphasis. I kept the paint (as does any painter, say Velazquez to pick the best) while leaving out Prince Baltasar, the horse and rider.
Positioning any painting along a spectrum between abstraction and figuration promotes a certain bi-polarity, as does a concern for the viewer’s spectral range of focus between painting as an image and as an object. This dichotomy may be a unique quality of a painted image, since the energy that manifests itself as color/light is generated from a physical body (the painting). Luminescent as other contemporary media are, film, video, and digital graphics are virtually ghosts. Painting is corporeal. Painting’s capacity to release energy off into a room is gauged by the collective meter of all the ineffable nuance that goes into making a picture and all the physical facts that make up a support.
Jung’s psychology of function-types distinguishes four modes by which the personality apprehends the world: thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation. This psychological construct provides a correspondent model for painting, differentiating four aspects of the viewer’s experience of a painted image through a kind of typology in quadrant, like a map of Portland. As an organizing principle, it provides some release from polarizing terms such as figurative, abstract, or even concrete, typical categorizations of painting. These four modes of the image could be deemed as follows:
The gestalt image, corresponding to the Jungian feeling or emotive function, is the separation of figure from ground, with weight and movement of composition, and the establishment of the pictorial dynamics of push and pull. Gestalt is the beginning of recognizing an image as distinct from the chassis that provides it support. Arguably, the viewer makes entry into a painting through a distinction of figure and ground even before recognizing the image.
The associative image, which corresponds to Jung’s thinking function, is active in figurative or pictorial depiction, painting’s most accessible aspect, experienced through the viewer’s memories and recognition of things. This is the rider on the horse. Historically, the mimetic in painting preponderates. People see the rendering first. Pictures are the most readily shared. While people may differ on their feelings about, say, dogs, they generally share the recognition of one. This objectivity begins to break down with the more subjective realm of color.
The color image, roughly correspondent to the Jungian intuitive function, is the choral sum of a painting’s hue and chromatic value. As mass tone or opaquely reflective surface, as under tone or glaze, and as atmospheric color/light, hue and value are the most ineffable of the image types, experienced in shifting impressions that leap freely between the psychological and the physiological. While there is an objective science to the compliments of the color wheel and the range of the spectrum, in practice, the choice of color is intuitive, and the varied response of the viewer, unpredictable.
The physical aspect, the paint image, aligns with Jung’s sensate function, and is the experience of both the corporeal body of the paint—matte and gloss, translucency and opacity, viscosity and so on—and also the subtle array of attitudes captured in the handling of paint, the glide and staccato, tremor and pulse, the mark. The paint image embraces all the cognitive clues that allow the viewer to distinguish different media and supports, from the obdurately physical to touch traces inferring attitude and intent.
A painting like a personality can have strong and weak functions, and an image can be more or less open. I’ve come to feel that an open image might be achieved by integrating all the elements within the viewer’s focus, a matter of balance. With this in mind, I’ve begun exploring ways to reintroduce associative imagery in a manner that won’t undermine the physical impact of the painting. The images posted on this blog are some of my attempts.
