The Intelligence of the Senses

THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE SENSES

All Creation is mystery. We can, if we are alive to it, move between spiritual and corporeal essence.

The orchestration that produces this array of inventive, beguiling works operates in that magical oscillation. Sensibility, intelligence and feeling compel every act of making art. Color and brushstroke, design and form, commit themselves to the pleasure of expression. The integration and movement of vision, the perception of overall shapes, of details, the stimulation and reaction of deeply felt but vaguely realized phenomena - of gravity, of proximity, of light moving across the room, of momentum and dissipation and fatigue - combine in the ineffable motion of the brush applying color to the canvas.

All this is so commonplace and mysterious. We know all of it implicitly, but cannot speak of it with the slightest accuracy. painting can. The whole enterprise of painting demands an entertainment of the most abstract values. Like music or mathematics, it operates on the highest mentative level. Pictorial life illuminates the dearest inarticulations of our being. The materiality of painting captures us. In the freighted gesture of every touch we sense three presences: the maker's, ours, and one other. Painting changes everything.

By unifying different sources of sensation, by integrating our disparate feelings into a single whole, for no matter how long, painting induces pleasure. And do not shrug off the notion of pleasure. It requires hard work and strength of character, the use of the intelligence of the senses, and is the most civilizing of influences.

The miracles have not yet ceased, I have no doubt, though indeed, there is not one miracle greater than another. Feeling is an act. In acts we find the truth. the truth resides in the activity of these beautiful pictures. Their configurations are both infinitely variable and stupendously exquisite.

Peter Leventhal

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