Every morning while working toward this exhibition, I started my day in the studio by making a sketch from a Cézanne painting. On that same piece of paper, I would write down notes and thoughts about seeing. Painters like Cézanne, Matisse, and Hofmann have nourished me for years—not only through their paintings, but through their written words and ideas. They are my constant companions at the easel. This essay grew directly out of those morning sketches and notes. It is simply an attempt to share how their way of seeing continues to guide my own practice.

Metaphor and Direct Experience

Art explores seeing—and how seeing relates to NATURE, CREATIVITY, INSPIRATION.

Metaphor in art is an object, narrative, or symbol in a painting that refers to something not directly experienced in the physical work itself, moving our attention away to another object or conceptual meaning. In metaphoric art, there is a subtle step away from the artwork—a break in real time to interpret a meaning rather than undergo an experience in the present moment.

Art can, however, act as a direct experience of the feeling of seeing itself. Unlike metaphor, an encounter with a majestic mountain does not refer away from itself; it is an uninterrupted experience of the present moment with heightened, intense awareness. There is an essential relationship between the seer and the seen. The feeling of seeing is an awareness of seeing yourself seeing—or more accurately, feeling yourself seeing.

Often this is first experienced in Nature: seeing awe-inspiring natural beauty that produces an illuminated pause in our experience. This feeling, which stands apart from the ordinary, often marks the beginning of a deeper relationship with the world. Through sustained contemplation, this feeling opens a deeper awareness of that connection, transforming our relationship to Nature. This is an affirmation—a feeling of being very alive and connected to the source of life.

At first, we may think the reason for this feeling is solely in the thing seen: the mountain, the vast ocean, the star-filled night sky. But as this feeling matures and as we explore it, we find our own subjectivity as the seer plays a vital role. A relationship between seen and seer begins to form. We may feel that both seer and seen in this kind of experience are wrapped in the same energized space. This is when the feeling between the two—mountain and viewer—seemingly flows back and forth. It’s a kind of exchange.

Painters often experience a similar feeling of awe or illumination in front of great art. This can be an inspiration. The expression of space, both metaphoric and “plastic,” is the realm in which painters have traditionally expressed these feelings most strongly. Think of the differences in how space is expressed across cultures and eras: space in Eastern art versus the West, space in Renaissance painting versus Modern Art. The space between the majestic mountain and the viewer seeing it is bridged by rapport. The inspiration the artist receives from nature gives them a chance to understand that the creative process—the same one that generates Nature—is at work in art and in the artist who is open to true inspiration.

The Spatial Realm: Inside and Outside

A large part of the feeling of seeing is awareness of the relationship between the seeing of outside appearance and the inside awareness of seeing. Inside and outside are felt to have their own distinct qualities of space. With awareness of inside and outside comes the possibility for a deepening relationship to the world from within. This relationship is the basis of making a certain kind of painting—one where normative appearance is altered. The relationship between inside and outside can be characterized as a push-pull between inside feeling and outside appearance, or our inner sensations of an object that is at a distance from us in space.

On the canvas, this relationship is painted in part with an emphasis on a back-and-forth movement between flattening space and creating the illusion of space. This movement between the object and our subjectivity begins to instill a feeling of freedom and aliveness to the painting. It comes closer to how we actually feel being in the space of the world, rather than relying on a pre-formed concept of space like linear perspective. It offers up natural questions of how and what we see.

Matisse seemed to believe that truth communicated itself to him, or perhaps he was able to tease it out of the object, by some sort of non-visual relationship which he described as “emotion” or “feeling.” Matisse said: “I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.” I have to ask: what emotion—from a table? One emotion Matisse evokes commonly is joy. But if you want to paint joy, why choose a simple table with ordinary objects? He did paint dance and music, but certainly a lot of interiors and still lifes. He often painted the same or similar objects more than once, but with different feelings, expressed through different ways of seeing them. The object is always there in Matisse, but it is not the end point of expression for his deepest feeling. Matisse was after an expression of non-visual reality. He called this “true painting.” He searched for true painting most profoundly with color—a distinct kind of “new” seeing.

The philosopher Paul Brunton wrote about seeing: “[If we] can understand the way the mind and the senses [seeing] really work, what the result of this working really are, and what direction they point to… if they can break through the barrier between flesh and thought which favors materialism and agnosticism and even atheism, then the perception actually becomes a spiritual experience.” If you are a painter, this is a very interesting, even inspiring idea.

Cézanne, Movement, and Space-Time

Cézanne studied nature like a mystic and gave Matisse the moral strength to deviate from the norms of appearance in art—a “moral” stance, because Truth for them was not the surface of physical matter, but the underlying, undivided Reality behind all appearance. Cézanne understood that what was important in seeing was the awareness of what his sensations were telling him about the object—for that was all he truly knew of nature: “Painting from Nature is not copying the object, but realizing one’s sensations.” There is a relationship here between the appearance of nature and the interior space of sensation. A primary component of his sensations was the sense of aliveness in Nature, Nature being everything we experience through our senses. Cézanne painted his felt sensations—particularly of movement—to create an awareness of space-time within each painting. This is expressed through relationships that involve the imagination, even a sense of movement. Imagination is not fantasy here; it evokes something that is real in seeing but has not yet been pictured. It is not a copy. He does not represent something that is moving or give a literal representation of space, but rather the feeling of these relationships in paint, moment by moment on the canvas.

This feeling of seeing movement as space-time actually resolves into a deep, monumental stillness—all the more powerful because the rhythms we experience move to a resolution more profound than picturing a static entity. This moment-by-moment exploration of time-space via imaginative relationships gives Cézanne’s work a feeling of being alive in the moment with the creativity of mind and seeing. He expressed this with a sensation of being a living, moving observer of the seen: eyes moving, head moving, feeling and thinking nature as he moved into nature. Nature is not static, nor was his way of seeing it. He painted the feeling of movement—not literal movement—on the static canvas as a feeling of the imaginative movement of space-time. We start to move away from metaphor in these paintings of Cézanne and Matisse the more we approach the feelings we get from great nature, rather than simply the appearance of things. This feeling of seeing is direct. Nature is creation in motion, and art is like that creation: both are a genesis, a becoming that we participate in as we see it.

Hofmann and Real Plastic Art

Hans Hofmann said: “Artistic expression is the metamorphosis of the physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality.” Hofmann painted and found his spiritual reality in the concept of push-pull—an active movement painted with plastic elements, where “plastic” refers not to material, but to the felt, malleable sense of space created on the flat canvas. Push and pull can be a metaphor for object and void, for a feeling of inner and outer, mind and spirit, becoming and being. As this moves toward “Real Plastic Art,” as outlined in his book Search for the Real, it moves beyond metaphor toward an experience of seeing two distinct elements interact to produce the feeling of a third—a generative presence born of paradox, mystery, contemplation, and reverie. The painting becomes a stand-alone experience in itself, communicating through empathy with the artist, who imparts deep feeling into his materials, which in turn convert back into feeling.

Hofmann wrote extensively about the mind of the painter and how he directs his materials by feeling; this feeling appears as visual clues to the viewer. He took up Cézanne’s qualities of movement, space-time, and light, articulating these in the relationship of each paint stroke of color to other paint strokes and to the canvas surface. It is the relationships between—not each individual stroke or color, but the feeling produced between them—that result in a non-material, felt plastic reality—a sense of living space. You might not feel in a Hofmann or Matisse the intent to make you say, “I love that blue color”; all of their intention is for the viewer to feel the relationship between that blue and red as an internal moment of space and time. It is these unseen spatial relationships—not the pictured elements, not the material, and not the image depicted—that have this feeling of life we are called upon to participate in when seeing it. For instance, when a red and a blue are tuned together, they create a spatial relationship that exists not on the canvas, but in the mind and heart of the viewer. This experience I call feeling—a particularly quiet stillness, not unlike the awe felt before a mountain, the ocean, or a star-filled sky. It is singular, and with conscious attention, it becomes a heightened experience we can cultivate.

Hofmann was very clear that artwork is a stand-alone experience, not dependent on the objects represented. These elements in themselves are not the source of the feeling; it is not pictured in the image presented, but in our experience of the formal elements of the painting. The artist’s material is transformed back into Seeing. The representation of nature is not the point; the point is to create a non-material, intuitive, spiritual experience. Matisse, Cézanne, and Hofmann replaced the object with sensations, ideas, and feelings in a way that moved beyond objects into relationships that are felt, but NOT pictured. In this way, the outward appearance of nature disappears. It is replaced by a coherent plastic art of a deeper way of seeing nature that Hofmann would call the intuitive and spiritual. Painting, he said, must mirror a mind and a soul.

Re-Created Flatness and the Generative Viewer

Hofmann was eager to teach this concept and his highest ideal: “re-created flatness.” In its simplest terms, any mark, paint, or drawing on a surface immediately creates an illusion of space. It is habitual and inevitable for us to see this way. Any mark on the canvas surface turns the canvas into an illusion of deep or shallow space. Our habit of seeing turns the mark into an illusion of an object surrounded by space. We are prone to turn seeing into illusion simply by applying materials to the canvas—we supply the illusion of space without thought or feeling. Hofmann’s ideal was the same as Matisse’s: “True Painting.” Painting without this habitual illusion, making painting into an experience closer to the “True” or “Real,” bringing an awareness of our consciousness to the artwork.

This brings our capacity for illusion into question and makes us aware of it. It means painting with the awareness of bringing the viewer’s mind and heart—the viewer’s interiority and subjective experience—to be part of the painting. This subjectivity reaches beyond the individual to a mystical or spiritual experience of a deeper creative Nature or Reality. It calls for a more profound experience of appearance and nature itself. These artists clearly intended for us to understand reality in a different way, where our participation in nature is an essential element of our place in the world. Seeing itself is a creative and generative process. We are part of creation in a different way, connected to Nature with our minds and hearts. This puts us closer to the source of Nature and brings an elevated feeling of life.

This is where Formalism meets mysticism. When two formal elements on a canvas—like a red square next to a blue circle—are perfectly tuned, they create a presence in the viewer. This presence is not pictured in the painting, but generated in us by the painting. It is not in the physical paint or colors; it is in our participation. That participation is generative: it has the ability to become a higher spiritual third element—an invisible, shimmering energy that does not exist in the physical paint itself, but is felt and experienced by the sensitive viewer.

“It’s not a matter of painting life; it’s a matter of giving life to painting.” — Pierre Bonnard

This can be embodied in how a painter paints; it is not just conceptual. It is a practice of painting in particular ways. The first priority in both painting and looking at painting is a feeling for life—aliveness—and not simply a copy of what nature looks like. To create the feeling of life, you need to add your presence into the painting: your subjectivity, consciousness, how you see, eye and mind—inviting the viewer to participate. Bonnard advised making drawing feeling and color thinking. This takes an engagement of imagination, a blend of thinking and feeling to have empathy in the work.

We achieve this by painting our own participation in nature, understanding that nature is a moment-by-moment unfolding in which the observer and the observed are united. A painting is not a static object, but a living event. Each mark is an intentional relationship of color and space, disrupting our habit of viewing the world as inanimate and separate from ourselves, and inviting a direct, felt communion between the seer and the seen.

Line, Arabesque, and Active Seeing

Driven by the desire to create a living event rather than a static object, Modern painters developed non-traditional ways of painting.

By structuring this aliveness directly into the work, painter and viewer are connected by an empathy of deeper seeing, rooted in the shared subjectivity expressed on the canvas.
In this respect, art is like a dream: it arises from an inner source of vitality, blending our individual consciousness with the creative forces of nature. That same inner creativity, once recognized, becomes the catalyst for making art.

Paul Klee begins his discussion of painting and drawing as “taking a line for a walk”—putting the artist’s eyes and mind into active motion. The artist moves their eyes out to see an object and brings it back into their mind before generating it onto the canvas, knowing form and space from the inside out. Klee thought this mirrored the active, “becoming” creativity of nature through the artist’s own creative process: eye and mind together. Sensation and mind build the image, making nature’s dynamic becoming a felt reality on the canvas.

The artwork then arises through a continuous, constructive meditation—blending inside and outside. The arabesque is another example of subjectivity in painting. Arabesque is felt in the body as a sweeping rhythm, a pulse—even, if sensitive, affecting our breathing while seeing it. Cézanne, Matisse, and Hofmann taught drawing this type of movement as a priority before drawing the object. This can be seen in their drawings, as well as in Cézanne’s famous non-finito—his practice of leaving areas of the canvas deliberately unfinished so the underlying rhythm remains visible. Traditionally in Islam, the arabesque expressed Tawhid, the concept of unity, showing how all life and existence in the universe flow from and connect back to a single source. Arabesque makes the relationship between forms more important than the forms themselves. It immediately introduces the painter’s subjectivity.

Arabesque expresses the painter’s spirit through an abstract experience of space, allowing the imagination to give shape to our raw sensation of depth. It is both flat and dimensional; it is push-pull; it is inner and outer experience. This is visual intelligence wrapped in feeling—a sense of feeling before thinking, an essential sensation of movement operating in a fixed, material painting. When you see the arabesque in a painting, it is active with movement. It gives a different sense to appearance, one of becoming, and the detached sense of outward perception is given over to a feeling of engagement with the painting.

This way of looking at a painting—looking for movement and pathways—is often called a “read-through” or active seeing. This introduces the element of time while looking. Art asks us to follow actively, building an image moment by moment. This can be characterized by the push and pull of Hofmann, expansion and contraction—both happening in an “inanimate” material object. Cézanne, who did not copy nature, expressed his way of working as being “parallel to nature” as his painted structure evolved with the feeling of seeing it. He worked from Nature, but his focus was the connection of sensation and inner experience as part of nature. Matisse continued this tradition, establishing that he also did not copy nature, but evoked the feeling of seeing—referring to his inspiration as a “rapport with nature,” and his direct participation as “love at first sight.”

Plasticity and SynCHROMicity

This feeling of animation and engagement with feeling and mind gets progressively more mysterious. Seeing through relationships—inner and outer, push and pull, color against color—reveals that reality is not merely a collection of isolated objects. This is the essence of the plastic in art: it is the experience of multiple elements at once, and the unified feeling that arises among them. It is not found in any single shape, but in an un-pictured event felt within the imagination. To see it, we must actively participate in the life of the painting—feeling an invisible plane of tension hovering between form and form.

This is the essence of the arabesque and its inherent rhythm. A single line can travel simultaneously on the surface and in depth, serving as the contour for something behind while anchoring a form in front. Here, space reveals itself as plastic—variable, felt, and free from fixed geometry. It comes alive through our direct participation in the work.

Perhaps most important, a tuned red and blue in relationship creates a third element—a feeling, an energy. It is a moment of synCHROMicity (a meaningful alignment of colors, or chroma), a feeling of the present, of presence, of being alive, and an experience of space-time. This is an experience of seeing. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote upon encountering a Cézanne landscape:

“These reds, these blues... their simple truthfulness, it educates you; and if you stand beneath them as acceptingly as possible, it’s as if they were doing something for you… a ‘beyond’ of color without any previous memories.”

Through empathy, the viewer bridges the gap between what is physically on the canvas—rhythmic lines, interacting colors—and a living experience that occurs in the moment of seeing. This is what makes formalist painting so deeply mysterious. For Cézanne, Matisse, and Hofmann, the artist who meticulously copies a tree is merely chasing an illusion. The artist who paints the subjectivity of Nature focuses on relationships rather than objects. By animating the inanimate, they invite us into living thought and feeling, bringing us closer to the primary force of being alive.

The Coherence of Stillness

Cézanne was filled with doubt and frustration for much of his life because his painting method was unusual and unrecognized. He persisted because he meditated deeply on nature, sitting for hours in stillness before his motif. His work was powerfully illuminated in late 20th-century art scholarship, connecting his late paintings, such as Gardener Vallier, to Bach’s fugues through a shared sense of felt rhythm. In these works, deep, fervent emotion evokes a stillness in which movement itself becomes figure. This is felt in the overall, total presence of the artwork—a point of coherence where the animated crisscrossing of movement and color is joined together. As these movements cohere, they afford a “standing-within stillness” that rests within structured movement.

As scholar David Nowell Smith observes of this dynamic: “It is this coherence, moreover, which constitutes the artwork’s ‘jointure of the shining of truth.’” We experience this truth when time seems to stand still within the tessellation of Cézanne’s brushwork—an opening and closing rhythm where crossing patterns of motion suspend time altogether. This is an authentic experience of TIME itself.

In the shape of Cézanne’s thinking and feeling, a mystic stillness is born of movement—a stillness where movement itself becomes figure, the very shape of thought. Here, the work’s agitated crisscrossing of lines and textures is joined into a unified whole. As these movements cohere, they afford a “standing-within stillness,” turning the canvas into a focal point where meaning and existence meet.