As in, how to continue the Six Persimmons painting now at the stage shown below. I am thinking about how the internal dialectic of the painting might be explicated in terms of it being a sublation. What is happening here has correspondence with Hegel’s term, Aufheben. I see numerous correspondences between pictopoiesis and other fields of thought and discipline, in this case philosophy.
In the links above, I notice the sentence, “In Hegel’s logic, self-contradiction is legitimate and necessary”
This holds true with the painting and points to one reason why it is so challenging at this stage. I know my system as well as could be (having built it up from fundamental units) and I know that I have to see it through to conclude this painting. But the necessary self-contradiction it inevitably contains means I have to inhabit very uncomfortable regions along the way. I remind myself that the avoidance of complacency leads to progress overall. This helps as that is a principle with general application, holding true outside pictopoiesis. As I jump off the cliff I have to trust that I can fly but I know for a fact that I don’t have wings
How then to navigate my way ahead on this? As always, Whitman in his Song of Myself (section 51) has a line to offer which I can turn to for solidarity: