What Drawing and Painting Really Mean

A Phenomenology of the Image

Paul Crowther

The bulk of this document is the Introduction to a book of the same title that will be

published by Routledge in its Advances in Art and Visual Studies series. The book’s main

theme is as follows.

There are as many meanings to drawing and painting as there are cultural contexts for

them to exist in. But this is not the end of the story. Drawings and paintings are made, and in

their making embody unique meanings that transform our perception of space-time and

sense of finitude. These meanings have not been addressed by art history or visual studies

hitherto. Indeed, the dominant tendency has been to reduce the visual image to models

derived from literary theory. This amounts to a kind of existential mutilation of drawing and

painting. Some philosophers (notably in the phenomenological tradition) have addressed the

meanings of these practices more insightfully, but mainly by assimilating them to their own

general philosophies rather than by offering a genuine phenomenology of what is involved in

the very making of an image – pictorial or abstract. By explaining and developing this, our

understanding of art practice can be significantly enhanced. What Drawing and Painting

Really Mean , provides, accordingly, a phenomenology of how the making of visual images

transforms both self and world.

 Introduction: Drawing and Painting in the Age of Networks

Philip Rawson said that ‘there always lies at the bottom of every drawing an implied
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pattern of those movements through which it was created.’ The same point can be made

about painting. In the present book, I argue that this relation between gesture and outcome

gives drawing and painting intrinsic significance. Of course, in an age obsessed by electronic

imagery and instant gratification, it may well seem that drawing and painting are no longer

relevant – or are so only by providing visual information and/or entertainment. However, this

position is mistaken. To understand why requires a detailed philosophical study of drawing

and painting as material practices.

The term ‘material practice’ is sometimes used as shorthand for viewing an activity

in terms of the circumstances (especially social and economic ones) under which it was

produced. In the present work, however, the phrase is used more literally. It refers to how the

autographic making of the picture – in terms of materials used, gestures employed, and

compositional strategies - is implicated in the broader meanings that it represents.

Unfortunately, the dimension of material practice has been largely avoided by both

philosophers and contemporary theories of visual culture. Instead, attention has focussed on

such things as how drawings and paintings are perceived, the informational or persuasive

uses they serve, or, more generally, on the changing networks of ideas and practice in which

they are produced. Andreas Rotmann claims that

‘There is no painting as such: delimiting its realm is indeed impossible since painting

expanded in the 1960’s (even more radically than it had during Cubism),when it embraced

ready-made objects, linguistic propositions, and performative elements in its pictorial

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sphere’
 The idea of there being ‘no painting as such’ is, of course, rhetorical overstatement.

Painting - as a practice of putting marks on a surface using viscous or liquid pigment -

continues much as always. It remains one of the most accessible and affordable idioms of

visual expression, and is not tied to specifically artworld interests (a point of political

significance that I return to in the Conclusion to this book). What has changed, of course, is

the scope of its uses in the professional artworld. There, painting can crop up as a feature of

other art practices as well as in its own right, and its meanings appear to be determined more

and more by the contexts of its use, rather than by anything to do with its intrinsic features. It

is caught up within broader networks of artistic practice.

David Joselit puts the issue as follows.

‘How does painting belong to a network? This late twentieth-century problem, whose

relevance has only increased with the ubiquity of digital networks, joins a sequence of

modernist questions: How does painting signify in the semiotic aporias of Cubism or the non-

objective utopias of the historical avant-gardes? How can the status of painting as matter be

made explicit (i.e., through the incorporation of readymades, and the rise of the monochrome

and seriality as well as the gestural techniques of dripping, pouring, and staining)? And how

might painting meet the challenge of mechanical reproduction…? None of these problems

exists in isolation or ever disappears; instead, there are shifts in emphasis in which earlier
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questions are reformulated through newer ones.’

Now, in almost all the recent theoretical discussions of painting, and, indeed,

drawing also, it is this networking aspect that is the focus of attention. In one sense, this

emphasis is inevitable - for reasons involving the limits of art, which I will again consider in

the Conclusion to this book. However, the more networking is laboured as the main cultural

entrée to drawing and painting, the more their status as material practices is suppressed.
 One important example of this suppression is a contemporary orthodoxy which

reduces the meaning of drawings and paintings to their position within networks of gender,

race or class relations, or issues of sexuality. At its worst, this amounts to a kind of existential

mutilation which restricts the products of embodied subjectivity to one selected range of the

subject’s capacities or identity, and which supresses the importance of factors common to all.

In effect, the embodied subject is reduced to a subject with an incomplete body, or to one

incapable of thinking outside the social conditions of its own subjectivity. However, as we

shall see, in making drawings and paintings the very act of marking a surface – whatever the

image is ‘of’, and whatever its narrative function, or cultural context – has a meaning in its

own right.

If this possibility is excluded, major questions are left unanswered. The obvious one is

why – in an age of digital images and gadgets – do people still want to draw and paint? There
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is a huge literature on the transformative influences of technology on human life, but it must

be emphasized in the very strongest terms that, as well as featuring in broader art projects - in

the ways indicated by Rotmann and Joselit - drawing and painting are still practiced on a

massive scale in their own right all over the world, by professional artists and others. Some

artists even use computers to create drawings and paintings or images that seem to be drawn

or painted. These practices, in other words, remain vital contemporary foci of expression.

This extraordinary persistence of drawing and painting can be explained – but only

if we answer an even deeper question. Everyone admits that drawing and painting can be

adapted to all sorts of artistic and broader cultural contexts, but what is it about them that

allows this adaptation? Networking does not simply change the significance of drawing and

painting, rather it is their character as material practices which create the conditions for

networking in the first place. How so? What are the intrinsic features that enable this

astonishing range of contextualizations? If we can answer this question, then we can

understand also why drawing and painting, as such, still thrive, even in an era of digital

imagery and gadgets. And the theory involved in this may, in itself, open up new networking

possibilities for drawing and painting as well as explaining them ‘in their own right’.

In respect of this, it is important to first clarify the basic sense in which these

activities are intrinsically meaningful. Drawing and painting (as activities and outcomes)

have intuitive levels of meaning over and above our awareness of what is being represented,

and why it is being represented. They tell us basic truths about how we inhere in the world as

embodied beings with spiritual awareness. Of course, ‘intuitive knowledge’ has associations

with that which is mysterious or ineffable, but it also has a more commonplace sense. This

centres on truths so familiar that they are easily overlooked, or – in concert - so complex that

we cannot easily put them into words.

In everything we do and the way we do it, our body orientates us towards the world,

and drawing and painting do this with a complexity that exemplifies intuitive meaning and

responds to some of its metaphysical implications. For example, the remark from Phillip

Rawson at the start of this Introduction, points out the blatantly obvious fact that

representations are records of movement that testify to those creative movements. In contrast

with the way movements are lost in time through the enacting of them, they are not lost when

embodied in drawings and paintings. But this preservation is not a mere mechanical recording

of the process of creation. The pictorial image involves a creative tension between the fact of

its physical and made materiality, and its way of projecting virtual space. We are located at

two different levels of reality, simultaneously – both here in the flux of things coming to be

and passing away, and a virtual realm that seems lifted above this.

These facts are basic meanings intrinsic to the making of pictures. They mainly

operate without being remarked upon, and, in concert with many others, form a complex

orientational whole. The level of intrinsic meanings, in other words, operates mainly in
subconscious terms – as a dimension of intuitive rather than explicit truth.

The present book’s argument is that once we recover this level of intuitively

operative intrinsic meanings, then broader metaphysical implications will also emerge.

Through this, we will be able to explain the fulfilment inherent in the making and

appreciation of drawings and paintings.

Interestingly, this question of intrinsic meaning has scarcely been raised, let alone

answered. There are two main reasons why. First, such questions may seem to focus on

discredited questions of ‘significant form’ and the work of figures such as Bell, Fry, and

Greenberg. However, the question does not reduce to their approach. For whilst these

thinkers raise a few relevant points – such as Fry’s visual categories and Greenberg’s

awareness of the plane, they have little or no sense of the deeper ontology of embodiment

that these features connect to. The intrinsic significance of drawing and painting involves the

relation between gesture and outcome, and not just a narrow address to formal relations. The

question, in other words, is not formalism’s to answer – whatever popular opinion might

think.

A second reason why the fundamental question has not been addressed is because

– as noted earlier - theories of visual culture tend to reduce the outcomes of drawing and

painting to mere signs in a broader network of signifying practices. The influence of thinkers

such as Saussure, Foucault, Barthes, and Lacan has led Rosalind Krauss, Mieke Bal,

W.J.T.Mitchell, and Norman Bryson (amongst many others) to claim that drawn or painted

images are best dealt with on the basis of models transplanted from the realm of linguistic

studies, where the main operative concept is that of the sign.

However, there is far more to drawing and painting than this. Linguistic signs

very rarely have any visual features in common with what they refer to, and even if they do,

this is not a condition of them being meaningful qua linguistic. The basis of meaning in
language is determined by rules and conventions alone. In the case of drawings and

paintings, mere difference amongst signs is not a sufficient basis for meaning. This is

because, whilst language can exist in a purely spoken form, drawings and paintings are, by

definition, particular visible things that fabricate virtual likeness using physical materials

manipulated by the creator. They are created images.

Of course, some pictorial images can be created electronically. It is useful,

accordingly, to use the term ‘autographic’ for those images which are made by hand or by

other bodily organs. They are not handwriting, but they do involve the image being created

through the body’s use of an implement or (more unusually) its own limbs to mark a

surface. Drawing, and painting are the products of gesture. As such they can embody

individual style (in personal terms, or as group or regional identities) in how the surface is

marked. In this sense, they are autographic.

Such autographic style has a number of aspects. For example, the choice of a

medium and the selection of what is to be represented are significant in this respect.

Important, also, is how the instrument is handled in creating the autographic image (a factor

that will be addressed in the greatest detail later on).

This leads to a useful contrast. Under normal circumstances, autographic writing

declares itself as having been physically created by a particular person. However, such

autographic style is not a feature in the semantic convention that governs the possibility of

writing as a communicative act. In some cultures, of course, autographic features are a part of

the meaning of written script, but the possibility of writing as a general human practice, as

such, does not require them.

Now, whilst drawn and painted images can be created to convey visual information

alone, what is decisive is how the image presents its subject-matter, and not simply what

kind of thing is represented. Even if the image is made so as to illustrate some particular
narrative or detailed description, qua autographic, this goal can be realized in as many ways

as there are people to make the picture. Everything hangs on how the drawing or painting

realizes this goal individually. The autographic dimension of such images is a necessary

feature of their meaning.

Sometimes, indeed, this feature can be the main thing that engages us. It is not so

much the ‘message’ that we are interested in, but the autographic style through which this is

achieved. Style in drawing and painting elaborates the individuality of the person or ensemble

who created it. This exceeds the mere enjoyment of harmonies of line and colour, and centres

on, rather, a felt aesthetic empathy with this particular way of interpreting the visible world.

The artist’s use of the medium to change how the world appears enables us to identify with

the choices and values at issue in such transformations. When this occurs we are dealing with

drawing and painting of an artistic kind. The way the work is made becomes the focus of

meaning.

Whatever art’s actual cultural origins, it is this achieved individuality of autographic

style that justifies it in conceptual terms. With most drawings and paintings we simply notice

what they represent, or what they are used for ,without reference to the fact that they are

created through bodily gesture by an individual. Of course, anyone making a drawing or

painting can be aware of these features in the course of technical issues. But on other

occasions – for both creator and viewer – there is a joy in both the act and outcome of

bringing-forth a representation. ‘Art’ is a form of social practice that centres on this

bringing-forth, and which makes intrinsic features of drawing and paintings into overt objects

of attention. Hence whilst, throughout this book I will be addressing drawing and painting as

such, it must always be remembered that art-making is where their intrinsic meanings (as it

were) come alive.

Becoming aware of this is only a starting point. Once noticed , the autographic
dimension has many further intuitive implications that can then be made explicit. They will

be considered in detail as this book progresses. To understand them requires that we look not

to analogies with language but rather to the nature of imagination and its relation to gestures

of mark-making. As autographic expressions of imagination, drawing and painting are, to use

Ernst Cassirer’s term, ‘symbolic forms’ i.e., logically distinctive modes of reference that can

be developed creatively under different historical and cultural circumstances. To be human is

to be through symbols, not just to use them. Symbolic forms transcend mere semantics to
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exemplify different ways in which humanity inhabits Being. As Cassirer shows, they have

their origins in the body’s basic cognitive engagement with the perceptual field (a feature that

will be explored in relation to the archaeological anthropology of drawing and painting in

Chapter 2). In the course of this study, it will be shown how, in drawing and painting, the

basic cognitive engagement just referred to is not merely present residually but is constantly

re-affirmed and taken to more complex levels. The unique aesthetic spaces thus created are

the basis of drawing and painting as symbolic forms.

Semiotic theories, unfortunately, have little understanding of all this. They tend to

overlook the autographic aspect of drawing and painting or completely misinterpret it.

Bryson claims that in western art

‘At the level of theory, the concept which suppresses the emergence of the sign as an

object of art historical knowledge is mimesis. The doctrine of mimesis may be said to

consist in a description of representation as a process of perceptual correspondence where

the image is said to match…,with varying degrees of success, a full established and
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anterior reality.’

This is the root of the problem. When talking of western art Bryson et al

emphasize the sign over mimesis (and over the gestural and autographic content connected
with it) because of suspicions about correspondence. For him and related thinkers, visual

images are sites where meaning is produced through signification rather than through

corresponding to some meaning-providing state of affairs.

However, a proper understanding of mimesis does not involve correspondence. As

we shall see in detail as this book progresses, a picture is mimetic if it presents enough

features of line, shape, and other visual detail on a plane surface, for us to take the

configuration to be referring to a specific kind of three-dimensional thing. Visual consistency

between the image and kinds of referent and not correspondence with particular referents (or

with the perception of such referents) is what is at issue.

Indeed, a great many pictures cannot correspond with the particular thing they

represent, because no such particular ever actually existed. However, they are still pictures.

This is because they present marks that communicate identifying visual characteristics of

possible members of particular classes of three-dimensional things. Whether correspondence

becomes involved or not depends on the kind of mimesis at issue, and not the mimetic

relation, as such.
The complexity of mimesis is especially manifest in abstract works. As we shall see

at length (in Chapter 6) abstraction is generally meaningful through the range of intuitive

associations that it creates through properties of optical illusion. Individual abstract works are

allusive images insofar as they are often visually consistent with different kinds of three-

dimensional entities, relations, and phenomena.

It is worth emphasizing that consistency between the visual image and its referent is

only the logical basis of the mimetic relation. To reiterate the vital point made earlier,

meaning in drawing and painting depends on the individual character of the image, and this

centres on autographic factors such as style. Linking this to the points just made, what is
decisive is the way in which style presents a relation between the image’s physical space, and

that of its gestural, optical and/or virtual content. In many contexts – especially artistic ones -

the image affirms itself through the autographic presentation of spatiality more than through

signification.

The truth of the matter is, then, that the making of images involves more than

theorists of visual culture generally consider, and the extra factor here pertains to the

ontology of the autographic image, rather than to contexts of production, reception, and

signification. True, how we think about drawing and painting will always be influenced by

contexts, but what they are as practices will always be more than contexts. We have to ask

the basic question – namely, what is it about them that enables them to be so widely

networked? By answering this, we liberate the image from semiotics. Indeed, as already

noted, this liberation may even disclose hidden levels of meaning with networking potential

of their own.

Of course, it might seem that to even ask what enables drawing and painting to be

networked involves an unwarranted ‘essentialist’ presupposition about the nature of

knowledge and explanation. Surely, there will be as many answers as there are different kinds
7
of drawings and paintings? However, in respect of this, it is worth keeping in mind some

remarks by Donald Davidson. He observes that

‘We can make sense of differences all right, but only against a background of shared belief.

What is shared does not in general call for comment; it is too dull, trite, or familiar to stand

notice. But without a vast common ground, there is no place for disputants to have their
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quarrel.’

I would argue that the ‘vast common ground’ in question here, is based on
physical embodiment and our relation to space. It is, indeed, in this very area that drawing

and painting find their own ‘vast common ground’ of meaning (qua bodily and cognitive

activities) that enables disputes about them to occur, and possibilities of networking to arise.

We must ask, then, where the philosophical materials to formulate the requisite

account of drawing and painting can be found? There are two magnificent books by

Whitney Davis and David Summers, respectively, which, whilst not specifically

philosophical works, nevertheless contain relevant material of great philosophical

substance.9 Davis’s wide-ranging theory of visual culture treats the visuality of visual

representation in a way that does justice to it at many different levels of cognitive effect

and contextualization. Summers’ Real Spaces…goes further still. It offers an analysis of

the logical structure of different idioms of visual creation that is frankly astonishing in its

descriptive and analytic scope.

Both thinkers deal with the dimension of autographic meaning and gesture at many

points, in passing. However, (and this is especially the case with Summers) their

discussion of visual structures in specific historical contexts sustains the burden of

exposition, and the intrinsic significance of the act of making drawings and paintings, and

the significance of the aesthetic, appears mainly, as it were, between the lines. In effect,

both Davis’s and Summers’s approaches remain spectator orientated.

In terms of overtly philosophical approaches, there a number of works in the analytic

tradition that discuss pictorial representation, but none of them have a developed notion of

the aesthetic, and only Richard Wollheim has focussed on the properties of drawing and

painting as unique artistic media in any extended way.10 But, it can be argued that his

approach dwells too much on the nature of spectatorship in drawing and painting, and not

enough on their status as mark-making activities with unique characteristics.

 For present purposes, however, it should be noted that Wollheim does make at

least one important threshold contribution to the uniqueness issue – namely, the notion of

‘Ur-painting’. This is a ‘thought model’ that, in effect, identifies six aspects to the act of

painting. First, the painter intentionally marks a support using a ‘charged instrument’;

second, as marks are placed, and an unmarked and decreasing area is left, the mark-placing

is then done with reference to the relation between the marked and the unmarked area;

third, the painter’s mark-placing also takes account of how the marks relate to the edge of

the support; fourth, the painter notices that some marks appear to ‘coalesce’ as wholes or

form units or unified groups; fifth, the painter notices that these ‘motifs’ manifest the

‘seeing-in’ phenomenon noted above; and sixth, all the foregoing aspects converge in
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some underlying purpose for which the painting is undertaken.

I describe this account as a ‘threshold’ phenomenon because Wollheim does not

develop it further. Indeed, he slightly downplays its significance by suggesting that it should

be regarded as something like those ‘state of nature’ myths used as models in seventeenth and

eighteenth-century century political theory. He also notes that the account of Ur-painting is

‘the imaginary development of an activity that isn’t painting but is like it, though more
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primitive.’ His reticence is well-founded, because whilst Wollheim directs us to some of the

most important areas that a theory of painting must negotiate, the interaction between them is

complex, as are each of the aspects, internally. The whole question needs to be approached

from a more comprehensive viewpoint.

To find the relevant orientation, we must look, provisionally, towards the

Continental tradition in philosophy. I have already alluded favourably to Cassirer’s notion of

symbolic form. He rightly observes that

‘All human works arise under particular historical and sociological conditions. But we could
never understand these special conditions unless we were able to understand the general

structural principles underlying these works. In our study of language, art, and myth the
13
problem of meaning takes precedence over the problem of historical development.’

Unfortunately, Cassirer does not follow this through in terms of the visual arts. His

account of them involves only scattered remarks - most of which address writers about art

(notably Hildebrand and Wolfflin) rather than the specifics of individual media. Indeed, his

concept of visual art is derived rather too closely from his philosophy overall, rather from

attention to the uniqueness of each art medium.

This latter point is true of the Continental tradition generally. Heidegger, Dufrenne,

Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze, have all dealt with the example of painting, or written dedicated
14
works on it. However, their discussions of visual art are based mainly on their more general

philosophical positions. Of course, these positions involve many illuminating insights, but

not much clarification of the individuality of drawing and painting, and the relation between

them. This is a worrying limitation. We need an approach that philosophizes the

distinctiveness of drawing and painting by looking in detail at how they are made, rather

than by deriving that process from a broader philosophical standpoint.

In practice this means an object-based phenomenology. Traditionally,

phenomenology is a mode of philosophy that emphasizes the close description of phenomena

as experienced at the most fundamental levels. (Anglo-American ‘analytic philosophy’ in

contrast emphasizes the analysis of how we talk about phenomena, and express our beliefs

concerning them.)

Within phenomenology, there are many different approaches – determined by which

levels of experience are taken to be fundamental. Thinkers such as Husserl take the way

phenomena are present before consciousness to be decisive. Heidegger, in contrast,

emphasizes the character of our cognitive and affective orientation towards Being, as such.
Merleau-Ponty holds that the most fundamental modes of experience are those arising from

the body’s sensori-motor capacities operating as a unified field.

For our purposes, Merleau-Ponty’s work points in the most useful direction,

because drawing and painting are so directly connected to the body’s intelligent gestural

activity. Indeed, he is the philosopher who has devoted most attention to the philosophical

importance of painting.

However, like the other Continental thinkers mentioned earlier, Merleau-Ponty too

derives his account of painting more from his broader philosophy than from close
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phenomenological description of the object itself. Suffice it to say, for present purposes,

that his approach (especially in the later work) gives great emphasis to the concept of

visibility. I think this is a mistaken emphasis (arising from his particular ontological pre-

occupations) and that the visible should be addressed mainly in terms of its relation to space-

occupancy.

This difference of emphasis, indeed, opens up many other areas of concern that

Merleau-Ponty does not consider – such as that of aesthetic space and planarity, and leads

also to some confusions, most notably in his understanding of linear perspective. However,

whilst Merleau-Ponty’s work has its problems, I shall also use and develop some ideas from

him at a number of points in this book. Hence it is worth providing an overview of his main

ideas and indicating some further limitations to them, now.

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy emphasizes that our knowledge of self and of the

perceptual world are correlated. They are joint functions of the body’s sensori-motor

capacities operating as a unified field. In his words,

‘My perception is not a sum of visual, tactile and auditory givens: I perceive in a

total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of
 16
being which speaks to all my senses at once…’

The ‘unique’ factor mentioned here arises from the fact that our perception is

selective and stylized on the basis of the experiential perspectives that arise from

embodiment and from our own personal history. We may all perceive the same physical

objects, but we characterize them in different ways, however slightly. This enables a major

connection to art. In Merleau-Ponty’s words ‘it is the expressive operation of the body, begun
17
by the least perception, that develops into painting and art’ He takes the importance of

bodily engagement for painting even further, as follows.

‘Things have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of

their presence. Why shouldn’t these in their turn give rise to some visible shape in

which anyone else would recognize those motifs which support his own inspection

of the world. Thus there appears a visible of the second power, a carnal essence or
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icon of the first.’

These remarks describe what Merleau-Ponty takes to be the origins of the picture

and painting. The ‘carnal essence’ he refers to is not a visual copy of the world, but, rather, a

subjective state that gathers up and concentrates the visible. Characteristically, Merleau-

Ponty leaves this in cryptic terms as though it were somehow self-explanatory. It is not. To

see what is at issue in the notion of a ‘carnal essence’ we need a properly developed theory of

the imagination - which Merleau-Ponty does not have. Chapter 1 will provide such a theory.

Whatever the case, it is clear that, for Merleau-Ponty, painting gives expression to

the carnal essence at the publically accessible level, and that through this, the visible is made

to exist in a more concentrated way. The reasons why have already been indicated. First, the

selective and stylizing aspects of perception are developed to a higher level precisely because
they are made available at the level of vision itself – rather than as an introspective state of

the artist. Second, as Merleau-Ponty says in relation to the painter’s work.

‘Light, lighting, shadows, reflections, colour, all the objects of his quest are not

altogether real objects; like ghosts, they have only virtual existence. In fact, they

exist only at the threshold of profane vision; they are not seen by everyone.

The painter’s gaze asks them what they do to suddenly cause something to be and

to be this thing, what they do to compose this worldly talisman and to make us see
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the visible.’

Hence, in painting, features and textures of how certain things appear to vision, are

disclosed. The painter identifies, interprets, preserves, and displays aspects of that framework

of ‘invisible’ relations and detail that constitute the full visual presence of the relevant item

or states of affairs, but which are usually overlooked because of practical considerations, or

because we are content to simply recognize the object rather than visually explore it. As

Merleau-Ponty says, ‘The visible in the profane sense forgets its premises; it rests upon a
20
total visibility which is to be recreated and which liberates the phantoms captive in it.’

Painting recreates this total visibility ‘by breaking the “skin of things” to show how
21
the things become things, how the world becomes world.’ In effect, painting thematizes the

very origins of perception itself. Equally important, is his emphasis on painting’s link with

embodiment as the decisive feature of its ontology. However, Merleau-Ponty’s theory is

mainly spectator orientated. His remarks about the actual process of making the work, and the

meaning of the gestures that are deployed are – again - opaque. In a famous passage, he

describes how affected Matisse was at seeing a slow-motion film of himself drawing, but in

his analysis, Merleau-Ponty dwells more upon the psychology of deliberation in making the
22
mark, than on the actual gesture and the details of its outcome.
 This inattentiveness to the process of making is connected to other difficulties.

Merleau-Ponty ‘s ‘invisibility’ does not, for example, distinguish between the physical

surface of the painting, the details of its virtual content, and the kind of visible object which

this virtual content describes. And whilst he does emphasize the notion of individual style, he

does not think it through in relation to these other features. An adequate theory of painting,

however, needs to consider the invisibility of all the aforementioned aspects, and the decisive

question of how they relate to one another. This requires an integrated account of the process

of making, as such.

As already noted, much of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking about painting is extremely

opaque, and this leads him to skate over one of the most fundamental issues of all. Consider

the following remarks.

‘Pictorial depth (as well as painted height and width) comes “I know not whence” to

alight upon, and take root in the sustaining support. The painter’s vision is not a view upon

the outside, a merely “physical-optical” relation with the world. The world no longer

stands before him through representation; rather it is the painter to whom the things of the
23
world give birth by a sort of concentration or coming-to-itself of the visible.’

In the first part of this quotation Merleau-Ponty refers to one of drawing’s and

painting’s most remarkable features – the emergence of virtual three-dimensional content

from a notionally planar and physically flat support. This is the decisive phenomenon that

links drawing and painting when embodied in pictorial representation or abstract art.

However, Merleau-Ponty immediately claims this phenomenon to be a mystery, and it is,

indeed, one that he does not address elsewhere. He follows it up with an even greater

mystery, the idea of the things of the world giving birth to the painter by a ‘coming-to-

itself of the visible’. This remarkable claim is also never explained in any detail.

However, I will deal with both these issues, further on.

 The points just made emphasize the importance of a claim made earlier. To fully

understand the meaning of drawing and painting as material practices, one must base one’s

phenomenology upon them, rather than import it from some external philosophical viewpoint.

Of course, there is no ‘presuppositionless’ seeing. But, if we want our phenomenology to be

object-based, there is a strategy that can realize this aim. I call it post-analytic

phenomenology. Instead of trying to begin from some phenomenon as it presents to

consciousness or whatever, we address, first, the way the term is commonly understood in

ordinary language. I call this the analytic reduction.

In the case of drawing and painting, for example, our ordinary talk about such

activities centres on them as ways of making of marks on a surface through gestures that

deploy (respectively) either solid instruments or ones charged with viscous or liquid pigment.

No matter how much drawing and painting are caught up in networks, this is the basic feature

that allows us to talk about them. Even if the terms have been unwarrantedly extended for

rhetorical purposes – as per the Rotmann quotation earlier - it is the phenomenon just

described that enables the extension.

Given this basic object-feature, we can take the investigation to a second level

through sustained phenomenological description of its many aspects. For a start, the marked

surfaces just referred to, tend to be physically flat in appearance (though they do not have to

be). Sometimes when paint is applied it is so in broad areas - done for mere purposes of

basic decoration (as performed by house painters and the like). However, when it is linked

to the generation of virtual three-dimensional form, or contrived optical illusion (as I will

show to be the case with abstract art) we have the basis of drawing and painting as activities

with profound ontological significance in terms of how we occupy space. To show this, we

must then consider how drawing and painting autographically realize the cognitive role of

imagination, and investigate in the greatest detail what it is to make a drawing and painting
– giving special attention to how this making embodies space at various different levels.

Finally, in a tertiary analysis, we must consider how both the making and

outcomes of drawing and painting intervene, symbolically, on broader aspects of

experience, such as our existential engagement with space-time, and on the question of

artistic meaning. In the present work, this broad guiding-strategy will be realized in more

particular terms through the following chapters and arguments.

Chapter 1 – The Cognitive Function of the Image

This chapter addresses the ontogenetic aspect of the origins of drawing and painting

- in features basic to cognition and experience. More specifically, it is argued that they

continue and complete processes bound up with the character of mental imagery itself. The

chapter presents, accordingly, an account of the cognitive significance of imagination with

special reference to its visual mode. Attention is paid to how the creation of pictures is a

material realization and further development of this capacity. The image is realized in an

autographic form that is a liberating alternative to mental imagery through embodying the

image in a more enduring form, and through extending its meaning through adaptation to the

materials of drawing and painting. Through this, it is able to exemplify the style of the

creator, i.e., his or her interpretation of how the world appears, visually.

Chapter 2 – Origins of Drawing and Painting: The Hominid Creation of

Aesthetic Space

The study now considers the phylogenetic aspect of the origins of drawing and

painting, through a detailed phenomenology of the earliest known example of the former –

namely, a homo-erectus shell engraving from Indonesia (430,000 – 540,000 years old), and

also a homo-sapiens engraved piece of ochre from the Blombos cave in South Africa (70,000
years + old). It is shown that there is much about these engravings that is basic to the future

of drawing and painting in both conceptual and evolutionary terms. They are indexical

images insofar as – over and above any explicit intentions the agent may have had - the

physical traces of gesture marked on the surface exemplify key aspects of how embodied

subjects inhabit space. The intuitive awareness of this explains why such images came to be

invested with broader symbolic meaning. They are the first expressions of aesthetic space,

and the way drawing and painting embody truths about the embodied subject’s relation to the

world. Attention is also paid to their relation to cave painting.

Chapter 3 – The Phenomenology of Drawing and Painting

Having addressed the ontogentic and phylogenetic origins of drawn and painted

images, the study now undertakes a phenomenology of all aspects of how drawings and

paintings are made, with an emphasis on differences and similarities between them. Special

attention is given to the materials of making, the significance of the gestures employed, and

their compositional articulation. Metaphysical implications of all these factors are considered.

This is the longest Chapter and presents the core-theory.

Chapter 4 – A Bigger Picture: Drawing, Painting, and Aesthetic

Space

With the origins and ontological basics of drawing and painting now set out in

detail, this chapter addresses the broader metaphysical implications of drawing and painting –

picking up points from the previous chapter, and introducing new ones. It investigates how

drawing and painting relate to physical and pictorial space, and to the complexities of self-

consciousness. All these strands of analysis are brought together in an account of aesthetic
space, as exemplified in drawing and painting. It is shown that this discloses important truths

about who and what we are, and our relation to Being.

Chapter 5 - Art’s Eternalization of the Moment

The previous chapter placed an emphasis on the metaphysics of drawing and painting

as embodiments of space. The present chapter emphasises their interesting role as

interventions on time. It is argued that the momentary has a conceptually necessary role in

the unity of human experience, which is rarely given its due. It is argued further that the

ontological structures of individual art media, allow them to engage with the momentary in

individually distinctive ways - in effect, giving the moment of experience or perception a

kind of symbolic eternalisation. Attention is then paid, in detail, to the special ways in which

the making of drawings and paintings achieve this.

Chapter 6 - The Meaning of Abstract Art

Here the meaning of drawing and painting in abstract art is considered. It is argued

that such art is made meaningful over and above the circumstances it was produced, by the

interlinking of two factors. The first is a presumption of virtuality, wherein we take any

abstract drawing or painting that uses display formats akin to those of pictorial representation

to be ‘about’ something other than itself. This is made possible by the fact that, in marking

any surface, some element of optical illusion is enabled. When such a surface is exhibited, we

intuitively read its qualities of optical illusion as evocations of the transperceptual – that is

the unnoticed realm of details, relations, and associations that subtend the appearances given

in ordinary perception. On these terms, the optical illusion in abstract drawings and paintings

is transformed into pictorial allusion.

Chapter 7 – Conditions of Creativity: Drawing and Painting with Computers

Here, the conditions of creativity in relation to drawing and painting with computers

are clarified through Cohen’s principle – the idea that computers will only match human

creativity when they acquire selfhood, but that such creativity can be extended by learning

from principles that are distinctive to computers themselves. It is argued further that there are

three basic idioms for drawing and painting with computers – by creating the image through a

response to external stimuli encountered through sensors; or through the image being

programmed through software to mark the surface without reference to any external stimuli

other than the artist’s programming activities; or by creating the image through programming

hardware in a way that allows for (or actively involves) interventions from the artist and other

contingent circumstances. The scope of these features is discussed through detailed reference

to the work of Patrick Tresset, Gerhard Mantz, Harold Cohen, and Desmond Paul Henry. It

is emphasized that the very contrast between the digital image and expectations based on

autographic drawing and painting, can give the digital work a quasi-magical or divine

significance.

Conclusion: Drawing and Painting at the Limits of Art

The Conclusion to the book as a whole, looks at the role of drawing and

painting as theorized throughout the text, vis-à-vis the issue of networking that was raised in

the Introduction. It is argued that the modes of material practice they embody mean that they

will always have an aesthetic legitimacy for the embodied subject that digital idioms cannot.

Their possibility remains close to the conditions of embodiment and the significance of

gesture in how we occupy and interpret space. They are living exemplars of aesthetic space.

In effect, drawing and painting pursued in their own right, stand in a relation of what Adorno

would call ‘determinate negation’ to the consumerism-driven contemporary artworld.

1_ Philip Rawson, Seeing through Drawing, BBC Books, London, 1979, p.25. Rawson is one

of a group of art-educators, psychologists, and art historians, whose work has touched upon

or explored some areas of interface between philosophy and the varieties of pictorial

representation. Besides Rawson’s work, see also John Willats’ important Art and

Representation: New Principles in the Analysis of Pictures, Princeton University Press,

Princeton, N.J., 1997; Michael Podro, Depiction , Yale University Press, 1998. Special

mention in this context should also be made of Patrick Maynard’s drawing distinctions: the

varieties of graphic expression, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2005. This is a

philosophical work, but one that focussed on mapping the different idioms of reference

involved in different kinds of pictorial representation, and their varying criteria of perception.

It brings together many of the important ideas from the aforementioned works, and takes

them further. However, as far as I can tell, the remits of Maynard’s project and those of the

other authors do not extend to the central problematic of the present work – namely, drawing

and painting’s intrinsic significance

2_ Thinking through Painting: reflexivity and Agency beyond the Canvas, ed Isabelle Graw,

Daniel Birnbaum, Nikolaus Hirsch, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2012, p.6 . The only major

thinker in recent years to have given painting its due as a material practice is James Elkins.

His work is especially attentive to some of the creative psychological effects that arise

through working with paint, and problems of education in visual art. However, he has not yet

developed a dedicated philosophical approach to drawing and painting. What Painting Is ,

Routledge, London and New York, 2000, is an especially interesting and provocative book

through its strategy of thinking the creativity of painting through in relation to alchemy. He

offers many nuanced insights on the poetics of paint-application, I would regard his book and

mine as broadly complementary. Also of importance is Elkins’s On Pictures and the Words
that Fail Them, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011. In this work, Elkins runs with

some importance philosophical themes – notable the figure-ground relation, but explores

them in a more interdisciplinary way than I do

3_David Joselit, ‘Painting Beside Itself’, October. Fall 2009, Issue 130, pp.125-134. This

reference, p. 125. For a similar emphasis see also, Painting, ed. Terry R. Myers, Whitechapel

Gallery/MIT Press, London, 2011; Why Painting Now? ed. ‘Curated by Vienna’, Verlag fur

Moderne Kunste, Vienna, 2013 5_ Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: the Logic of the

Gaze, Macmillan, London and New York, 1983, p.38; ‘Semiotics and Art History’, Mieke

Bal and Norman Bryson, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Jun., 1991), pp. 174-208

4_ See, for example, John Lechte’s Geneology and Ontology of the Western Image and its

Digital Future, Routledge, London and New York, 2012. Lechte’s book is a

methodologically sophisticated analysis of theories of the image as such, and of the

historically changing ways that the relation between image and artefact has been understood.

His book emphasises conditions of reception rather than the autographic making of drawings

and paintings which are the focus of the present study. There is also a major contrast in how

Lechte and I understand the image. He is much influenced by Sartre’s theory – with its

emphasis on the phenomenology of the image as something imagined. My approach offers a

more detailed phenomenology that emphasizes the role of imagination in the unity of the self.

I argue further that, in effect, drawings and painting are developments and completions of the

power of imagination. Jos de Mul’s Destiny Domesticated. The Rebirth of Tragedy Out of the

Spirit of Technology. State University of New York Press, 2014, is an important thinking-

through of the problem of finitude in relation to technology. The present work relates to this

problematique also (albeit in a more localised way)

5_ The best source for Cassirer’s treatment of these issues is The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms , (Vol. 1) Language, trans. R.Manheim, Yale University Press, London and New

Haven, 1965; and also An Essay on Man, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1944. Cassirer

discusses the visual arts at a number of points in his oeuvre but does not analyse them in any

detail. And whilst his references include some remarks about drawing and painting, they are

offered mainly from a spectator-orientated viewpoint. My approach, in contrast, gives much

more emphasis to the making of the autographic image, and to other symbolic features that

Cassirer does not address (such as the way in which drawings and paintings, qua autographic

images, involve a range of intuitive symbolic associations that transform our experience of

finitude). There is certainly a case for arguing that my approach shows how Cassirer’s

philosophy of symbolic forms might be developed further - through a shift in orientation

from general theory, to the detailed analysis of particular symbolic forms. But this, of course,

might mean that ‘discoveries’ at the more particular level would require significant changes

to the general theory. I have offered an account of the strength and weaknesses of Cassirer’s

philosophy in Chapter 3 of my book Philosophy After Postmodernism: Civilized Values and

the Scope of Knowledge, Routledge, London and New York, 2003. The relevance of

Cassirer’s ideas and my own for the understanding of pictorial art are the subject of Elena

Fell’s and Ioanna Kopsiafti’s monograph Thinking Space, Advancing Art: Cassirer and

Crowther, Cambridge Scholars Press, Newcastle, 2015. See also the chapter on visual art in

the same duo’s book The Cognitive Basis of Aesthetics: Cassirer, Crowther, and the Future,

Routledge, London and New York, 2016

6_ Bryson, Vision and Painting, op.cit., p. 38

7_ I have refuted this scepticism at length in Chapter 1 of Critical Aesthetics and

Postmodernism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993; and Chapter 9 of Philosophy After

Postmodernism: Civilized Values and the Scope of Knowledge, Routledge, London and New

York, 2003
8_ Donald Davidson, ‘The Method of Truth in Metaphysics’, included in his Inquiries into

Truth and Meaning, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984, pp. 199-214. This reference pp. 199-200

9_ Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture, Princeton University Press,

Princeton, 2011; David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western

Modernism, Phaidon, London and New York, 2003.

10_See, for example, his essays ‘The Art Lesson’ and ‘On Drawing an Object’ included in

On Art and the Mind, Allen Lane, London, 1973, and his Painting as an Art, Thames and

Hudson, London and New York, 1987. The following analytic contributions are worthy of

mention. Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge

Mass., 1990. (This is a wide-ranging book that goes beyond exclusively pictorial issues);

Robert Hopkins, Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Inquiry, Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge, 1998. Two books by Dominic McIver Lopes are relevant -

Understanding Pictures, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996, and Sight and Sensibility:

Evaluating Pictures, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005. The former is probably the best

single book on the philosophy of pictorial representation as such; the latter is, in contrast,

extremely weak both philosophically and art historically. (In terms of art history, for

example, Lopes discusses the well-known romantic masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa at

some length, mistaking a key aspect of the iconography, and taking the work to be by

Delacroix when it was actually painted by Gericault.) Patrick Maynard’s Drawing

Distinctions (cited in note 1) is relevant as well, though it has a more empirical orientation

than the aforementioned works. One paper in the literature stands out very positively as one

of the few to explore the relation between drawing, as such, and pictorial representation. This

is Susan Feagin’s ‘Pictorial Representation and the Act of Drawing’, American Philosophical

Quarterly, (24) No.2, April 1987, pp. 161-170. Feagin’s account emphasizes the cognitive
structure of the act of drawing in relation to mental states. My own approach, in contrast,

looks towards the cognitive significance of the physicality of the artist’s gesture

11_ See Wollheim, Painting as an Art, op.cit., p.19-22

12_ Wollheim, Painting as an Art, op.cit., p.19

13_Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, op.cit., p.69. The chapter on Art in this book (pp.137–

170) is the most extended piece of writing that Cassirer did on the topic. However, its

treatment of the visual arts is extremely scanty. For a slightly more sustained treatment see

his references to Wolfflin in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, trans. S. G. Lofts, Yale

University Press/ New Haven and London, 2000, (for example, pp.60-64)

14_ Heidegger, Dufrenne, and Lacan are expounded and criticized at length in dedicated

Chapters included in Phenomenologies of Art and Vision… op.cit. For Derrida, see my review

of his The Truth in Painting, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 29 No.3, 1989, pp. 271-273.

Nigel Wentworth’s The Phenomenology of Painting, Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge, 2004, also frames painting in terms of ideas from Continental philosophy but

does very little in the way of explaining painting’s philosophical significance on the basis of

drawing and painting as material practices

15_ I have shown the difficulties in Merleau-Ponty’s position in the long dedicated Chapter

in Phenomenologies of Art and Vision, op.cit, and dedicated Chapters in The Phenomenology

of Modern Art: Exploding Deleuze, Illuminating Style, Continuum, London and New York,

2013; and Phenomenology of the Visual Arts, op.cit

16_ Merleau-Ponty, ‘Film and the new Psychology’, in Sense and Non-sense, trans. H. and P.

Dreyfus, Northwestern University Press, Evanston Ill., 1964, p.48

17_ The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson,

Northwestern University Press, Evanston Ill. 1993, pp.106-107

18_ Merleau-Ponty Ibid., p.164

19_ Merleau-Ponty Ibid., p.166

20_ Merleau-Ponty Ibid., p.128

21_ Merleau-Ponty Ibid., p.141

22_ See Merleau-Ponty Ibid., pp.82-83

23_ Merleau-Ponty Ibid., p.143