Category: Class Notes

Notes from “Thoughts About Painting” by Louis Finkelstein from “Painterly Painting,” 1971

“Between technique, vision, design, expression there is no seam; neither is one thing the cause and another the result.”

“Painterly…the subordination of individual objects to the sense of the circumambient medium, or the rendering of optical values as distinct from tactile, or as giving weight through color rather than through modeling, or as a distinction of focus through variations of brushstroke, etc.”

“Each painter’s idiosyncratic painting style is the…realization of several successive kinds of reading into the way paint symbolizes air, matter, space, light, flesh.”

“…sustaining of penetration so that the artist continually moves past a simply available solution to one which has greater depth.”

“What we take to be the same color when it has a vague edge is perceived completely differently from when it has a defined edge.”

“color modified by reflected light”

“color modification by simultaneous contrast”

“the amount of visual information which is capable of being transmitted by optical arrangements is in excess of what we require.”

“Rembrandt’s reduction creates and fortifies expression. This is because it acts out the way in which we find meaning in our living experiences.”

“Every choice, every action which decides something about each event must be taken with a view to the longest structure in time and sound which will give to the separate elements the most articulate meaning.”