A002 - Toward Nature

Toward Nature

Nature is the manifestation of God, which is the words, the principles, the great mind, or whatever you call it. We will never know what God is in its entirety. We only know to the extent that we reason and experience. God does not favor anything but to choose a thing that adapts itself and survives what God presents. We are the chosen ones. By survival, we’ve been carved out so that we respond positively toward a certain visual arrangement of nature. That is where our aesthetic innocence or truth lies upon.

Artists want to convey their emotions or ideas to others through their paintings. The artists must acknowledge that the mind of a human being is already influenced by evolution so that it favors certain arrangements of visual markings in nature. We often notice that people try to make narratives out of an non-objective painting by recognizing a glimpse of familiarity in it. For instance, an art critique described Mark Rothko's painting with blue, green and red rectangles as something we are already familiar with. He claims that the painting offers an atmospheric perspective where the blue is distant mountains, the green is forest and the red is rocks in front. Mark Rothko, though he might not have intended a parallel to reality in the painting, said that “I adhere to the material reality of the world and the substance of the things.” Our emotion toward a landscape with a winding river through meadows backed by high hills or remote mountains is fertile, safe, comfortable and beautiful. Dutton said in his Art Instinct that this is because our genes evolved to favor those arrangements of nature for survival. Our emotion toward nature is already part of our innocence that no one can escape from.

Nature has unlimited variety in its visual arrangement due to its eternal causality based on randomness. In theory, we are unfortunately unable to come up with something new now and forever. Any visual marking is either already existing or will appear at some point in time in nature. However, it is also true that it will take eternity or at least an inconceivable amount of time for nature to create exactly the same visual arrangement that we create as long as we do not copy it. That's our reality as artists. As such, we must not try to stay away from nature claiming it is a distraction. Instead we must study what nature already gave us as our innocence and utilize it. Jackson Pollock exactly did that when he replied “I am nature” to Hans Hofmann who suggested painting from nature instead of chaotic drippings. Pollock relentlessly studied the rhythm of nature since his early paintings. The dripping and allover technique were just very novel means to achieve the same goal, which was to bring nature's chaotic rhythms into his paintings.

July 2020

Pyungchul Kim