Sensory Experience of Perception

PLACES

“I remember only ideas and sensations.” (Ulysses, the Corrected Text, page 7.) 

I’m sure I read this passage the two or three times I set out to read Ulysses. I didn't notice it, however, until I heard it read aloud recently. I was struck by how it treats ideas and sensations as aspects of knowing, and how knowing is entangled with and informed by the sensory experience of perception.

Perceptions are the results of sensation. Ideas are the products of cognition

Experiencing place is a complex multilayered experience. My earliest memories of place help me recall what I was feeling at the time, sounds — what people were saying, music, birds, traffic, animals — also smells, taste, weather. 

Visual memories are a significant source of access to experiences of place. They are interwoven with knowledge acquired through study and travel.

My artistic  and intellectual work is refracted through an amalgam of fragments from the various categories of knowledge of place.

Zürich

I like being in Zürich. It is visually and culturally engaging.  

            The Limmat where it flows into  the Zürichsee

Paris is important and has its own place in the website. Please click the link below.

Paris link 

Aix en Provence is where Cézanne lived and worked. 

 In the third week of October 2018, I visited Cézanne’s studio, and the quarry Bibémus where he painted. Bibémus was compellingly, almost painfully, beautiful. 

 When I observed in person the subjects of various paintings from the locations where he made them, Cézanne’s reorganization of the optical reality of the motifs was more clearly evident than was apparent from looking at prints and photographs. It is obvious that Cézanne was indifferent to depicting beauty and was concerned, instead, with rearranging the compositional elements of what he was looking at, in order to create visually satisfactory paintings.

[Add Pissaro and Cézanne paintings with captions.]

[Add photo(s) of visit to Cézanne studio.]

 Mont Sainte Victoire  from where Cézanne painted it

[link to Ideas chunk #34]

I took the above photograph in the Bibémus Quarry on the spot designated as the location where the artist made the painting. Standing where Professor Loran photographed the mountain, and where Cézanne painted it, enabled me to see how remarkable Cézanne's departure from depiction in favor of abstraction was. 

 I was fortunate to have studied with Loran, and, fifty years later, to have seen for myself the basis of his contribution to understanding the development of modern art.

 Erle Loran took the photograph below, sometime before its publication in the April, 1930, edition of The Arts (p. 528). He included it in the 1959 second edition of his book “Cézanne's Composition” (p. 60). 

The photograph also appears, on page 501, of the first volume of Rewald's catalogue resonné of Cézann's work, published in 1998. The caption reads, “Motif for No. 837. (Photograph John Rewald, circa 1935)”.

Alaska

Montana

For the last forty years I have spent part of every summer in Montana.

                                     Looking west across Flathead Lake

The Mountains of California

Angeles National Forest-Highway 39, Angeles Crest Highway, Highway 2, Cajon Pass, Mount Wilson Trail, Mount Baden Powell, Old Baldy, Mount San Antonio, Pine Beatles.

 The Sierra Nevada - Owens Valley, Yosemite, Mount Whitney, Mono Pass.

 My First Summer in the Sierra, John Muir; Up and Down California: The Journal of William H. Brewer, The Thousand Mile Summer, Yosemite Trails, J. Smeaton Chase. 

Coastal California 

Mendocino, Fort Bragg Studio, Bolinas, Oysters

Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana; California Coast Trails, J. Smeaton Chase.

 Belmont Shore in 1946 and 1947.

New Mexico -- Toddler on the ranch,