Abstract Painting as Illustration

In my talk, I will show how my abstract paintings exemplify the central ideas in Thoughtful Images: Illustrating Philosophy Through Art. They do so because they evoke metaphorical allusions and illusions through ambiguous and contradictory “fidelity-felicity” form that Wartenberg argues is central to visual illustration. As a result, my paintings illustrate philosophical ideas and content, analogous to the paradoxical Rabbit-Duck illustration and Wittgenstein’s claim: “the meaning is in the use”. Meaning, or content, is the central problem in modernist-late modernist abstract painting. When Clement Greenberg claimed that the only content in abstract painting is the literal medium and surface, he excluded referentiality or representation of something not present in the painting. Greenberg’s claim for non-referentiality and two-dimensional flatness of abstract painting paradoxically cannot be experienced. My abstract paintings admit this paradox by showing that all abstract form, inherently meaningless and content-free, is always perceived as alluding to real world things and private and public identities and narratives. These allusions are ambiguous; that is, many-layered visual metaphors. Although the basis of a painting is its two-dimensional pictorial space, in perception we are always seeing or imagining it metaphorically as three-dimensional even as we know it’s two dimensional, or flat. Thus, my abstract painting is also intentionally illusive in evoking three-dimensional form contradicted by two-dimensional flatness. In explaining how my paintings illustrate this fundamental contradiction, I employ many of the ideas about illustration Wartenberg discusses in his book.