The shape of feelings

I recently read a paper by Gernod Bohme 'Atmosphere as a Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics', Thesis Eleven, 36, 1993, p. 113-126. (German: 'Atmosphäre' Essays zur Neuen Ästhetik, Frankfurt/M, Suhrkamp, extended edition 2013.) and his ideas about the sensibility of space. He suggests that it has atmosphere, an aura, something vague (and often dismissed as a tangible formal aspect in art work) but still very much there. He suggests that things have an atmosphere before you arrive, and that we have a sense of it with our whole body. This rang true for me, and the knowledge I have of things, their inside outside qualities and the interactions that occur. Bohm quoted Hermann Schmitz another philospher who acknowledges the aura of things. I checked him out and a bottom line for him is that feelings are things or half things, making them something that can be talked about. He goes on to say that we may think our feelings are private, but they are shared, perhaps by physically observed giveaways, and the fact is humans have emotions and feel their effects, from others as well as themselves. Schmitz asserts that feelings are what motivate us, and in my experience I easily concur. Acknowledging feelings, and accepting them as ones own lived experience supports ones mental well being. Identifying the lived experience and the feelings with it (experiencing and living are synonymous and require feeling)as ones own makes them things. They are things one can dwell in, returning to what might be called memories. However though a memory and feeling 'thing' have crossovers, but they are not the same. The feeling thing may evoke emotions but it is not a particular emotion. I am starting to investgate these areas futher using words. As I gather up the various things(subjects) that fall into my paintings I keep returning to finding the mood of the piece as my dterminer of what can stay, and if the mood is not there I am lost. It is not something easy to articulate and I circle around understanding the sense of a place to make a start. Even that is not a sure thing. I am trying to discern something by feeling the exchange between spaces, and of the spaces within things that are also in exchange. From the exchange there is a shape of the feeling that is almost independent of the parts; an over arching shape. This is the true subject of the painting. The theories of Bohm and Schmitz support some of the knowledge I access through my creative methods, but they do not explain it. The painting below was originally a big pink ear hovering over a road through a narrow forested valley. It was not working. I added cut out pieces of plywood. Eventually the painting came to be the elusive quality of a relationship occurring in a particular time and place.

In the living room, oil on panel and plywood, 24''x24'', 2012