In my thesis, I present a body of work created during my third year of study and the final year of my studies. I approach these works primarily through the process of their making, which is organic and intuitive, with each new work opening the way for the next.
The main aim of the text is to consider painting as a sensory and embodied experience. Central to this is an understanding of the processes that take place within the painting and within our bodies. To explore these processes, I turn to Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sensation, through which I approach the painting as a field of sensations that primarily elicits a bodily perception in the viewer. I attempt to illuminate this pre-reflective experience of painting, and more broadly of our visual world, with the help of the phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Drawing on the writings of Susan Sontag and Juhani Pallasmaa, I further seek to establish the importance of the direct and multisensory perception of art, which extends beyond its content-based interpretation.
Throughout the chapters, I examine the formal and semantic dimensions of the body and landscape in painting, as well as the area in which they intertwine. For this purpose, I introduce the concept of the “bodily landscape,” through which I consider the body and landscape as bearers of sensation on the painted surface.
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