Reality in Canvas

The scorching Sunday sun accompanied an artist standing tall at the edge of Monkasel Park. She faced a plein air easel holding her small canvas, surrounded by the hesitant ripples of the Kalimas River, the aged beams of Pemuda Bridge, and several children and elderly onlookers. Occasionally, they busied themselves with curiosity, questioning the painter’s activity beside the murky river.

For the artist, reality was what lay before her—her canvas, brushes, pigments, light, the forms of objects she sought to understand, and the new shapes she had created. However, for many visitors to Monkasel Park or art enthusiasts attempting to grasp the creative process of an artist, reality was the object being painted itself.

The two perspectives held by the artist and the observers regarding the reality of the re-creation (or recreation) process often differ, sometimes even contradicting each other. Artists—painters, sculptors, or engravers—frequently receive praise accompanied by questions about their work, such as: “A beautiful painting, it looks just like the real thing.” or “The sculpture is stunning and looks so lifelike.”

Such remarks, on one hand, hold great meaning for an artist, but on the other hand, they raise a fundamental question for re-creators: What is truly real? What defines reality?

A teacher, children’s story writer, homemaker, musician, and German-American philosopher, Susanne K. Langer, shared the same concern when faced with a work of art. Langer was a rationalist thinker who valued imagination as equally important as logic and scientific reasoning.

For her, art is the result of a re-creation process carried out by humans according to what they understand. Human understanding itself is embedded in the mind as a structure (or system) of images, words, rhythms, and various other signs that can construct a specific concept of an object.

For example, when a little girl receives a red balloon from her older sibling, reality for her consists of a kind sibling and the red balloon that has now become hers. This creates a sense of joy as well as a responsibility to ensure that the balloon does not pop or deflate too soon.

The girl’s happiness and sense of responsibility result from the combination of several pieces of information: a kind sibling, the ownership of a gifted item, the balloon’s fragility, and the color red. All these elements come together to form words or visualizations in the girl’s mind.

Unlike artists, the little girl in the previous example is not creating a work of art. She is processing and organizing reality, forming a new understanding of her emotions—similar to how we interpret road signs or changes in traffic light colors. However, a more complex process occurs in the mind of someone engaged in artistic creation.

Take, for instance, the artistic process of a painter or photographer. Both attempt to capture what they initially perceive as reality, transforming it into a new reality shaped by their conceptual understanding. The choice of objects, composition, light intensity, or brushstroke pressure represents an artist’s effort to materialize the concept they grasp. A painting on canvas, a photograph within a frame, a rhythm in a musical score, or a sequence of words in a poem—each becomes a new reality constructed from concepts formed in the human mind.

An artist, or what Langer refers to as the man of art, possesses the ability to create a new reality atop the pre-conceptual reality present in their work—a process she defines as re-creation. When a painter transfers the reality of the Kalimas River onto a strip of canvas, a new reality is simultaneously born on that canvas. The three-dimensional reality understood by the artist materializes through wooden brushes into a two-dimensional world.This process is not a simple repetition, like recursive calculations in factorial functions, which are structured and rhythmic. Instead, re-creation involves a wealth of conceptual understanding that is ultimately reduced to what we call subjectivity or emotion. An already existing object—urban restlessness, a vase of flowers, a relative’s lament, or the warmth of sunlight reflecting on the Kalimas River at half-past three in the afternoon—cannot be re-created as it is by an artist. These objects represent realities that dissolve into human understanding, organizing themselves into concepts before being reborn through the re-creation process of artistic expression.