The “catastrophe”, the painting to be done!

As you know, I have been teaching painting for 40 years to students worldwide, whether through our painting workshops in Europe or our online courses. As a teacher, I must constantly reinvent myself. That is why I am sharing this fascinating, enlightening, and demanding essay by Gilles Deleuze, Sur la peinture – Cours mars-juin 1981. This is still a relatively new publication—345 pages—released in 2023 by Éditions de Minuit in Paris. The book holds such significance that the University of Minnesota Press is currently translating and publishing it — I’ll let you search for further details on Google. Of course, I could ask ChatGPT to write this post, but it would lack the humanity of my own reading experience.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995 seen here in this photo par Hervé Gloaguen, sets out here to establish a logic of painting, seeking to grasp every gesture of the painter even the one before the very first stroke is even made. A blank canvas is a space brimming with possibilities—“a painting to be made,” as Cézanne wrote. It is what Deleuze calls the “catastrophe”—nothing can be seen, yet everything is there as if one were trapped in the eye of a storm. And from this catastrophe, one must find a way out: the very first stroke, a scribble, clichés to be destroyed, “forms that fade away”; erasing, starting over; “the hand, freed from the eye, runs wild,” and then—there! “The color rises,” and so on until the final work emerges.

What a magnificent text! But how demanding it is!

Deleuze strives to reveal the internal coherence that underpins pictorial art. He delves into the underlying principles that govern its process—void, line, language, grays, color, form, and more—all from the very first marks on the canvas, which he calls the “diagram.” Cézanne, Mondrian, Klee, and others lend support to his ideas. Their writings guide Deleuze, along with those of Turner, Bacon, Michelangelo (the immortals), and many more.

This is a French book, written by a French philosopher, who proceeds through deduction: the logic of reasoning, the logic of organization, the logic of a system—the system of painting itself.

If I am sharing this reading with you, as I currently do with my students, it is because it invites a deep awareness of the very act of painting. It has allowed me to better understand the gestures of my aspiring painters from the moment they immerse themselves in the canvas. The result is a critique that is both objective and illuminating, fostering students who are fully conscious of their actions. Painting is not merely imitation—that would be too easy.

Deleuze reinforces what I have been teaching for the past 40 years (along with my academic training), yet I also recognize that my courses will now be further enriched, and ultimately, all Walk the Arts participants will rise to new heights.