...the everyday phenomenal world is messy

Western Sword Fern

“In order to get a fern leaf to be symmetrical, I would have to torture and kill it—cut it and press it between planes of glass. I cannot see the fern leaves without the light that filters through the mango tree above them, a cacophony of chaos in itself—a tangle of branches and leaves, though not without order. The light that reaches the ferns dapples them randomly, illuminating some parts and leaving others lost in mysterious shadow. If the light doesn’t reach them, they die. In order to paint a living fern, then, I need to paint random spots of light revealing parts of fractal forms twisted out of symmetry, simultaneously conveying their irregularity and imperfection while recognizing their fractal regularity.

More often than not, the everyday phenomenal world is messy.

My atelier training has given me a deep distrust of simplifying phenomena into abstract formulae. Much beauty is lost in the reduction…while rejecting most conventional systems of proportion, doesn’t object to starting out with a lightly sketched, erasable, oblong sphere for a head, and irregular cylinders for limbs, but it quickly acknowledges irregularity, asymmetry, subtlety and surprising departures from predictability…

Conclusion

… Goethe had a keen understanding of antiquity and the essential unity of knowledge—a point where art, science and philosophy converge. He clearly recoiled in horror against the idea of a science that excluded the human observer, understanding the appalling consequences. With genius, brashness, and a sense of humor, he claimed scientific valid­ity for the artistic method. It is a story of heroism perhaps unparalleled in history. The evidence suggests that the story may be true:

One element of atelier practice that helps students to see the vibrant qualities of color, is the idea that one must look for the most intense colors in nature next to the boundary between light and shadow. Shadows themselves, and fully lit areas of objects, generally contain colors less intense than the colors found in half-tone, right on the shadow edge.

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Since the artist’s study of nature did predict some of Goethe’s find­ings, in finding color on the border between light and shadow, for example, it is not unrealistic to expect the evolving tradition to keep generating useful ideas. The artist’s tradition is a phenomenological study of light, shadow and color, as well as a study of patterns, structures and meanings in the visual world—built upon hundreds of years of intersubjective corroboration—so it ought to be useful to physicists interested in a phenomenological ap­proach to nature.

The stakes are high. If conventional science tells us that a sunset is about particles and wavelengths, as if human experience of color does not exist, it may lead to still more technologies that further devalue and erode human sensual experience. As a teacher and an artist, I understand that people are losing their ability to see. We are losing our very humanity, our most basic instrument of knowledge. Why? We are too busy to slow down and look… The seeds of violence and alienation are contained in the method. Only a science of wholeness can put the pieces back together…I am uncomfortable with the idea of a world without human eyes to appreciate a sunset. I hope that the process of continually training my eye, and training the eyes of others, will awaken organs that will help to heal the sad tragic rift between nature and culture, subject and object, spirit and matter.

 The Artist’s Study of Nature and its Relationship to Goethean Science

Daan Hoekstra

Atelier Sonorense pp. 339-345