The 19th Century German Idealist we are reading in glass, along with other elements of the Romantic period such as a presentation on the founding of field theory by one of the physics faculty, and a film on Mesmer, have left me inspired and reflecting on my own experiences. The following is what I jotted down after class in which we were asked to relate the material in class back to our own fields and interest:

While painting I have come to forget red, violet, green, orange, and so on. The deeper I get into color, the more I come to experience light, the further these distinctions are from my mind. Now when I paint I see pushing and pulling, approaching and receding, warmth and coolness and even now these words like color are just categories of experience when what I really come to experience is light in all my known interpretations of its meaning. The categories were tools needed to get this far but they have to be left behind. They are too general, too limiting, and too artificial to take into account what I really see which is a complex rythm and harmony dividing on the surface of everything I see. There are no walls, no hard edges between blue and violet. It is all one giant harmony. To capture it on canvas is to capture a small piece of life.

If you do not believe me than truly look at a Rothko. "Its just a red rectangle and a violet rectangle" you may say. Well damn your words. What the hell is red? What the hell is violet? They are tools and concepts used to categorize a phenomenon, and it is not the phenomenon. It is blinding you from what exist in the pure state of experience. It is a harmony of light, a harmony that is played out every time you open your eyes. Do you know what a compliment is? For example blue and orange at opposing ends of the color wheel? Well look at the sun setting orange light on the surface of white snow and you shall see blue shadows. Compliments is just a word used to categorize the natural phenomena of light. It sings to our eyes because it is out of nature, and we are out of nature and are built to experience and adapt to nature. We did not make harmony, harmony made us. We did not make beauty, we only named it.

Andrew Wyeth - "In finding this one object, I find a world. I think a great painting is a painting that funnels itself in and then funnels out. I enter a very focused way and then I go through it and way beyond it."