What is real or actual? Everything and nothing
Oriel Queen's Hall Gallery | Wales | 2010
From his ongoing research Colman has turned his philosophies to the subject of landscape, in particular – the question that surround the depictions of landscape. Questions about mood, does the mood of the artist effect how the landscape is addressed? Does the landscape have a mood?
In reflective judgments the viewer of a landscape seeks to find unknown universals for the given particulars. But, at the same time we subsume to the actual, to what is already known, “it is the job of the artist to seek out the other truth” Colman believes. The truth, he sees (creates) lie in the symbols for human emotion that can be found in the landscape.
Kant’s agreement is a purely sensory judgement – the tree is beautiful, grass is green but what if the artist’s mood determines something different, the tree is ugly…! Or what about the mood of the viewer? Their mood at a given time will affect the experience of the landscape depicted in this case through the medium of paint.