Microcosm of a process which is guided by the whole

All this was the wholeness of that place, visible for an instant. Concretely, the wholeness was experienced, and remembered, as a kind of light. I remembered the quality of this wholeness, its structure, not by remembering a pattern of centers as described in Book 1, but by remembering the melody of this wholeness as a single structure. I experienced this melody as a feeling, or as a kind of light. Then, when I went back to my studio, and started the painting, I tried to create an object which re-established this wholeness, which shone with that light, that melody. So, I was trying to copy, not the details of the scene but the wholeness, the life. Then, in trying to capture this life as a whole, I constructed a variety of details, until these details made that feeling and that wholeness and that life shine out.
In general, the important thing is that the process was not based on details, but on the whole. At the moment I saw the ship, I concentrated on the particular feeling of light which existed at that moment. I tried to retain this structure in my mind. […]
What I felt at that moment and remember even now, was the particular kind of light, the wholeness of the scene — not in its details, but a particular colored light, which occurred as a whole.
Later, in my studio, I began trying to re-create this wholeness. In doing this, I was not trying to make the scene realistic in the ordinary sense. I was not trying to paint the ship in detail, or the water in detail, of the bridge in detail. If I had been doing this, I would have been trying to build the wholeness from the details. But that would not have worked, and that is not what I did. I simply began placing colors on the paper, in the hope that the vivid life-filled light which I had seen would somehow begin to shine forth from the painting. That is what I cared about. So, I was not drawing from life, but trying to create a drawing which would give off life, making an autonomous construction (at first, in colored pencil on a piece of card, later in oils on a board).

In this process, the wholeness generates the details. This is what I mean by a new kind of process. The living wholeness guides every step. The details are born, created, brought into existence, only to create that wholeness and its feeling as accurately as possible. It is the life of the whole which matters.
Oddly, though, as a result of this process, the painting seems very realistic. It creates the same feeling as the scene itself created in me at the moment when I saw it. But it became realistic because it was generated from the real life of the wholeness, not because of slavish mechanical copying of details.

It’s a little like Apple’s focus on user experience, without even telling customers about specific technical features — decisions that were necessary to create a product, for instance the speed of a chip, or the details about temperature throttling — it is all just in service of the larger whole — a great user experience — anyway.

Once again, the focus on the wholeness, and the attempt to enhance the whole (this time through color) brings with it, naturally, some of the fifteen properties in the geometric structure which creates the color. […]
In each case the appearance of the property in question is present in the wholeness observed originally (the bridge itself) and plays a key role in forming the wholeness in the painting because that, too, is made of structures of centers which enliven one another through the fifteen properties. This structure of the picture may then be intensified and used, in the process of unfolding, to accentuate the wholeness, and to create a vivid version of that whole, exactly by underlining and increasing the action of the emergent fifteen properties, one at a time.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/9 The whole#