Painting as Wissenschaft

Every painter starts from an empty canvas. The importance of no-form (blank canvas) for the form with infinite details within the whole (image of a landscape, or anything else) is not a contradiction. It is the basic opposition present in every emergence and which any painter faces. By putting paint on the empty canvas, it becomes somehow creatively violated as some meaning emerges beyond the paint applied. That process is an act of getting to know—something that the painter has created right in the process of painting. The painter—like a writer or a child building a castle in the sand—gets to know oneself in relation to the object one has just created. That knowledge is at first trans-verbal—only later to become an object of language-based interpretations. Carus’ canvases are externalizations of the deep knowledge seeking by his soul that was far from being a blank page on which the painter could draw any landscape, image of nature, or a symbolic scene-—at one’s will. When we go deeply into Carus’ prevailing themes in his paintings, we may discover the credo of constant striving toward an unspeakable feeling of deeply personal divinity. He was clearly not a “landscape painter” as he is viewed—largely based on his letters on landscape painting (Chap. 6 ). It would be more fitting to consider him a soul-scape painter—even in his landscape paintings, it is his soul that guides his hand. In this chapter, we outline a model of hypergeneralization of knowledge that builds on the combination of ordinary details of painting.