Discerning significant forms in random
manifestations
Our abilities to discern significant forms in
random manifestations of nature have evolved as some physiological
aspect of a survival strategy, probably connected with
environmental imperatives of our hunter- gatherer
ancestors. On the face of it, these resemblances of one thing
to another appear to be far more impressive than of clouds to
mountains, or distant scattered rocks to a flock of
sheep.
For instance, from eight points of light, the
Greeks and Phoenecians drew the cape of Orion and behind that the
phantom presence of the man and his sword. Twenty stars
sufficed to embody the mast and rigging of the ship Argo. The
relation of these stellar constellations to the form of a vessel is
just as inscrutable as the eight stars of Orion are to the shape of
the hunter and his cloak. The process of constellating is
indifferent to the natural world of likeness. The technique
is neither mimetic nor abstract. It comes from an innate
human capacity to discern a contour by the viewer who seeks to
conjure a body from a chance cluster of points, a random network of
lines, or a weathered rock. This is nothing more than saying that,
in painting, the random or accidental is just as likely to be the
beginning of a subject, as a church tower glimpsed between
trees. It initiates an idea that the artist wishes to build
up into an order, but a kind of order that in the end retains the
aspect of the original disorder.
