ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the feeling of getting one’s painting right. Its basic claim is that, via painting, painters aim to articulate elements of their own experience, and that feelings of rightness accordingly depend on how successfully these elements are formalized in the developing work. The chapter also maintains that we learn to articulate elements of our experience in our earliest interactions with others. When our experiential states are reflected and corroborated through these primary exchanges, we experience rudimentary feelings of fittingness and resonance. This, it is argued, instills in us the permanent desire to engage with objects that feel right, and that make us feel right, too. The chapter therefore proposes that feelings of getting it right have a dual structure. On the one hand, they depend on the specific experiential elements that are being worked on in the painting. On the other, feelings of rightness are connected to one’s existence more comprehensively. This aspect of the feeling depends on having one’s overall sense of being reflected back in ideal form by the painting. Thus, the need to get one’s painting right also involves the existential concerns of being fully alive and meaningfully connected with one’s surroundings.
