Reading more about Karl Popper in Wikipedia, I found that he wrote a book with John Carew Eccles, 1977, The Self and Its Brain. As a graduate student, I knew of Eccles because he visited my mentors. This was towards the end of Eccles’ science (laboratory) career. I was struck by a talk that he gave because, in addition, to lecturing on his electrophysiology he also talked about his spiritualism. But I have not followed up on his more philosophical writings.

Another memory that came back to me relates to mysticism. As a child, I once thought how tedious it was to have to relearn so many things that I once knew.

Jay — if I ever take up watercolor again, I’ll remember your advice. I keep finding new pure hues in oils that delight me….

Birgit — I looked up Karl Popper on Wikipedia and was struck by this quote (from Wikipedia): “He proposed three worlds: World One, being the physical world, or physical states; World Two, being the world of mind, or mental states, ideas, and perceptions; and World Three, being the body of human knowledge expressed in its manifold forms, or the products of the second world made manifest in the materials of the first world (i.e.–books, papers, paintings, symphonies, and all the products of the human mind). World Three, he argued, was the product of individual human beings in exactly the same sense that an animal path is the product of individual animals, and that, as such, has an existence and evolution independent of any individual knowing subjects. The influence of World Three, in his view, on the individual human mind (World Two) is at least as strong as the influence of World One.”

I keep thinking about human perception and how what we see and experience is negotiated through our brains, and the individual brain seems to have different paths which have grown through earlier experiences. Or so I understand it. Popper seems to be in agreement with recent neurological studies.

I’ve been looking at your watercolors while taking a break from moving plaster about. I am musing over possible profundities to add to this string and coming up dry. But a few things have caught my eye: there’s a nice sense of balance in the postures and proportions of your sitters even though photographic accuracy was not, perhaps, a goal. Instructor Bob and Unknown, with their wet-on-wet look have nice visual surprises in the facial features and in the relationship of heads to backgrounds. Instructor Bob is especially provocative with his Mohawk, arrowhead, Gorbachev reddish feature, which, for its unbidden aspect, fits right in. And the way Unknown melts into her background is inspired.

You know, one can be precise with watercolors in that one can lay down a trial patch of color on a margin to see how it looks.

I don’t know if this is what you mean by live and dead tones, but I’m thinking about Whistler’s Arrangement in Flesh Color and Black: Portrait of Theodore Duret (at the Metropolitan Museum in NY). In the painting, Duret is wearing black evening dress and has a pink cloak (“for a masquerade” according to Whistler’s instructions to him) draped over his arm. The background is that silvery smoky taupe that Whistler did so well. The point of all this set-up is that if you hold up your hand and blot out the black, the pink goes dingy gray; likewise if you blot out the pink the black goes dead. The exquisite relationship of the tones makes the portrait. I realize it’s hard to appreciate on a monitor, but is that the kind of thing you have in mind?

This typically long address will take you to the painting on the Met’s site:

http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/collection_database/Arrangement_in_Flesh_Colour_and_Black_Portrait_of_James_Abbott_McNeill_Whistler/ViewObject.aspx?depNm=all&pID=0&kWd=whistler&vW=1&Pg=1&St=0&StOd=1&vT=1&OID=20013586

Sounds like you had light from the blue sky falling on the whitish wall, next to the part illuminated by yellow sun.

This makes whole and perfect sense to me, even if/when I can’t achieve it.