What Does an Artist Capture? - Jacob Hamilton

 What does the artist capture in his artwork? This question has emerged in class on multiple occasions. If a painter paints an image of a chair, what is captured in that image? One might naively respond that the artist has captured the chair. This answer implies that the artist has tried through his art to produce a duplicate of a chair. If this is the artist’s end, then the artist is in pursuit of a frivolous end. To recreate or reproduce a chair via the medium of painting will only produce a highly deficient chair. One cannot sit on a chair that has been painted and it is therefore a very bad chair. Therefore, it is highly dubious to maintain that the artist’s job is to produce duplicates of things.  The question remains, when an artist paints a chair, what is he trying to capture? 

When we engage with objects in the world, we are not engaging with things in themselves. Rather, we engage with objects as they relate to us. If an object bore no relationship to the subject, the object would be unknowable. The mere act of gazing upon an object puts one into a relationship with that object. Yet, our relationships with objects are not static. My relationship with an object such as a house can change and mean different things at different times. A single object also has different relationships to different people. For example, I have a certain relationship with my childhood home because I grew up in it. Someone who visits my childhood home possesses a very different type of relationship with it. The object is the same but the relationship is different.  

When an artist paints a chair, he does not seek to duplicate it, but to capture a particular relationship between him and the chair. A good artist will be able to capture all of the nuances in a relationship with an object. For example, part of my relationship with my childhood home is that it carries sentimental value. A good artist, when painting a picture of his childhood home, would be able to capture the feelings his childhood home evokes. Here, the artist is able to capture his own relationship to something, which is something private, and make it a public object.