On Beauty and Expressions of Augenblick: A Treatise on Painting

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Authors

Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-09-21
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22878127
Primary Topic
Art, Aesthetics, and Perception
Type
preprint
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preprint

On Beauty and Expressions of Augenblick: A Treatise on Painting

Alexey Steele
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Art, Aesthetics, and Perception
preprint

On Beauty and Expressions of Augenblick: A Treatise on Painting

Alexey Steele
preprint en

Abstract

ABSTRACT This treatise advances a theory of painting centered on the Augenblick—Kant's term for the blink of an eye, that moment of sudden, overwhelming clarity at the threshold of something the mind cannot contain. The work argues that art's highest function is not representation but encounter: to make the unknowable experienceable rather than known. Across eight interconnected essays, the treatise develops several key propositions: that beauty is not a quality residing in objects but the bravery of facing what could overwhelm us; that the painter's task is to capture the cognitive grasp in the moment of its occurrence, before it fades; and that this capture demands a specific methodology—what the Spanish Baroque masters called manera abreviada, the abbreviated manner—where paint is put down with force rather than caressed, and every additional stroke risks retreat from the Augenblick into the safety of completeness. The treatise articulates the position of the "emphatically empathic witness"—a third stance between aesthetic distance and emotional dissolution, where the painter feels the full weight of what is seen and stays anyway, transmuting empathic reception into emphatic mark-making. This stance is traced through a lineage extending from the nineteenth-century Russian pedagogical tradition through the author's own practice. The work concludes by examining how these painterly principles connect to broader questions of cognition, pattern recognition, and the structural grammar underlying strategic and creative thought—suggesting that the discipline of the Augenblick may illuminate not only painting but the nature of insight itself.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Art, Aesthetics, and Perception
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