Patterns That Last

 

Peter Davidson - Stretching — In Space, Not Time

(Study of a hard working Japanese woman) 

Pencil, ink, felt tip pen, pastel on F2 paper

This essay applies concepts from physics to explore fine art. In my own painting, drawing, and broader praxis, I intentionally remove the element of time from observation and this is a work in progress

 

“Why Fine Art Persists as Spatial Structure”

When you look at a Leonardo da Vinci drawing today — perhaps preserved in a museum — you are experiencing something remarkable. The photons entering your eyes are entirely new, yet the influence of the artwork persists. How can something so old still affect you?

The answer is structure in space, not time. Influence does not travel through clocks or physics; it is embedded in spatial patterns that endure.

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1. Energy Meets Structure

Each photon interacting with your eyes carries energy:

$$E = h \cdot f$$

Where:

• $E$

  $E$ = energy of the photon

• $h$

  $h$ = Planck’s constant

• $f$

  $f$ = frequency of light

The photon’s energy is new, but the pattern of pigments and canvas remains the same. Influence persists through structure, not through temporal flow.

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2. Structure Survives in Space

Why does da Vinci’s influence survive centuries?

• Pigment molecules stay in place.

• Paper or canvas resists decay.

• Museums maintain stability against environmental factors.

This persistence is structural, entirely free of classical time or academic theory.

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3. Influence Depends on the Observer

Not every observer experiences art the same way:

• Humans perceive color, detail, and composition.

• Other species interpret light and motion differently.

We can express an observer’s experience as:

$$Influence_O \approx Structure_{art} + Interaction_{O,art}$$

The structure persists, while each observer reconstructs its influence differently.

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4. Decay as Spatial Interaction

When an artwork begins to deteriorate — fading pigments, fraying fibers — this is not the passage of time. It results from interactions in space:

$$New\ Structure = Old\ Structure + Influence_{environment}$$

Environmental factors like air, water, and light cause decay. Time is not involved; only space and relational influence matter.

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5. Space Over Time

Scientific models often impose temporal constructs because they are easier to measure, but this does not mean time is the most accurate or best way to understand fine art. A spatial-relational reading aligns more closely with how artworks actually exist and how aesthetic influence is encoded.

Even studies like Meng et al.’s, which describe the “temporal progression of aesthetic judgments” in dynamic generative art, can be understood differently: what they measure is an observation of relational change, not a fundamental property of the artwork itself. Art’s influence persists in its structure, and observers interact with that structure anew 

Meng, P., Meng, X., Hu, R., & Zhang, L. (2023). Predicting the aesthetics of dynamic generative artwork based on statistical image features: A time-dependent model. PLOS ONE, 18(9), e0291647. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291647 

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6. Putting It Together

• Space is primary: The pattern exists and persists.

• Influence flows from interaction: Observers and environment interact with the structure.

• Observers are unique: Each reconstructs influence differently.

Mathematically:

$$Influence \approx Spatial\ Structure + Observer\ Interaction + Environmental\ Interaction$$

What survives is the pattern itself, not photons or any temporal measure.

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7. Why This Matters

This perspective reshapes how we think about art and perception:

• Art is persistent structure, free from classical time and academic theory.

• Influence exists purely through interaction in space.

• Decay and disappearance occur because structures collide with environmental elements, not because “time passes.”

• Every work of art becomes a bridge across space — a timeless connection, reconstructed anew by every observer.

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Conclusion

Looking at a centuries-old drawing is not just observing ink and paper. It is experiencing timeless influence: a connection embedded in space, preserved in patterns, and flowing through relational interactions — entirely beyond classical temporal frameworks.

The Scintillation of Delay: An Observational Study

 

Paul Cezanne - The Garden at Les Lauves c1906

Phillips Collection

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_C%C3%A9zanne_-_The_Garden_at_Les_Lauves_(Le_Jardin_des_Lauves)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

The Scintillation of Delay: An Observational Study

This study does not emerge from art-historical interpretation but from direct studio practice. It is derived from observation within painting itself — from the lived mechanics of perception, hesitation, and inscription. Where art history describes outcomes, Studio Praxis seeks to describe mechanisms.

The most critical juncture in this system occurs at what I call the scintillation in delay. This is the precise, shimmering interval where optics meet material — the instant in which a spatial event is committed to a surface.

Painting is not simply representation. It is transfer.

Light does not arrive as image; it arrives as energy. Each photon carries energy proportional to its frequency:

E = h * f

(Energy equals Planck’s constant multiplied by the frequency of the light.)

When this energy enters the organism, it is absorbed and transduced. Chemical excitation becomes electrical impulse; electrical impulse becomes neural activation; neural activation becomes motor intention; motor intention becomes pigment displaced across a surface. The mark is therefore not a depiction of an object but the material residue of absorbed light.

Yet this transfer does not occur without interval. Between perception and inscription lies delay — however minute. Even within fractions of a second, the originating intensity begins to dissipate. Painters experience this not as theory but as difficulty: the subtle fading between seeing and marking, the loss of immediacy that occurs in recall.

This interval is where the scintillation appears. It is the apogee of perceptual charge — the peak moment before dissipation overtakes intensity.

In The Garden at Les Lauves by Paul Cézanne, this condition becomes visible. The painting does not record objects; it records the management of delay. Cézanne does not overextend the interval in pursuit of academic finish. He stops at the threshold — at the moment when perceptual energy remains alive. The unfinished edge is not incomplete; it is preserved intensity.

From studio observation, a consistent condition emerges: Conceptual Energy decreases as Temporal Delay increases. The originating charge cannot be perfectly sustained across time. It decays according to the relation:

E(dt) = E0 * e^(-lambda * dt)

Where:

E0 = the initial absorbed energy of the perceptual event

dt = the delay between perception and inscription

lambda = the rate of dissipation within the organism

To extend delay is to risk attenuation. Once the scintillation peak has passed, further technical refinement does not increase meaning — it reduces it. This is the persistent error of equating labor with intensity.

The studio is therefore not primarily a site of representation, nor a reenactment of historical style. It is a field of energetic timing. The painter does not copy the world; he intercepts light and negotiates its decay through delay.

THE DAVIDSON HYPOTHESIS The Physics of the Scintillating Mark I

Peter Davidson - Decaying studio apple 2026

 Pencil, felt tip pen, white out pastel coloured pencil on paper

16 cm  x 8 cm

The Physics of the Scintillating Mark I

“I am not describing a theory from the outside; I am constructing a system through the praxis of painting and drawing, building it from within the act itself.”

We do not inhabit the world in real-time. There is always a gap, Δs, between photon striking the eye and hand touching the surface—we are here and we are not here. We are never fully present. This interval may not be a flaw but a condition: a Sovereign Zone in which aliveness is assembled and rendered.

Within this delay lies an interior expanse, a viscous, reactive medium I call Optical Jelly. Sensation bends it, memory thickens it, tradition exerts inertia. As long as life persists, the Jelly remains pressurized, converting difficulty into potential.

Δs does not simply interrupt perception; it appears to construct it. What feels immediate is stabilized within the delay. Optic input thickens with memory and expectation, accumulating as non-linear pressure. The organism cannot sustain indeterminacy indefinitely, so discontinuous signals are stitched into apparent continuity. This is the necessary fraud—not deception, but fabrication. Immediacy is produced. Drawing reopens that stabilization. By lingering within Δs, the artist resists premature closure and exposes the act of construction itself.

Hesitation, erasure, prolonged looking—these function as charging operations. The greater the tolerated difference between perception and resolution, the greater the eventual force of release. When potential saturates, a threshold is crossed. A vertical leap across Δs: the Sprite. The mark is its fossil. Scintillation—the vibration of the line—records resistance overcome at the moment of conversion. The mark does not depict the object so much as register the crossing.

This can be observed in the yard at 2Dogs Art Space. Light, scent, sound, temperature—the external field remains constant. Yet the dogs diverge. One halts, suspended in saturation. Another moves fluidly, converting uncertainty into direction. A third commits too quickly and misaligns. Memory reshapes their interiors. The yard stays fixed; the organisms shift.

Perception is less reception than navigation. Identical inputs, divergent crossings. The artist differs only in remaining conscious within Δs. Drawing records not the yard, but the traversal.

Δs endures across tools, media, and eras. A drawing’s value may lie in its fidelity to the charge preceding discharge. When the organism dies, its interior field collapses. Potential dissipates. The mark remains—a residue of delay made visible.

Jelly → Δs → Sprite: a working model of conversion, tested in the act and preserved in the line.

The Sovereign Zone: A Defense of Artistic Praxis and the Delay

 

Peter Davidson - pomegranate delay and scintillation on rock hook

Perspex drypoint etching on paper

8 cm on 10 cm 

The Sovereign Zone: Art Finished Through Delay and Scintillation

I’m building a language for artists — not for art historians, critics, academics, or bureaucrats. They’ve made their own languages, but those dialects fail to capture the actual delay between the optical and the spatial.

That delay manifests as a scintillation of influence — a vibration that only stops when the artist decides the work has reached its apogee. This is why an artist refuses to paint or draw all the way to the edges. To do so would be to finish a "graveyard image," dead and static.

The nature of that delay is where true influence happens. It’s the gap where every viewer sees the work differently. That isn’t a mistake; it is the fundamental nature of how we perceive space, light, and material.

The Sovereign Zone: A Defense of Artistic Praxis and the Delay

The Architecture of Restriction

In the traditional studio, rules function as a form of architectural order. They regulate the margin, the edition, the depth of line, and the cleanliness of the surface. Often, these standards restrict the artist before they even begin, crushing the scintillation of the original idea at the edges of the plate in a rush to produce a "finished picture". These standards claim to be neutral, but they rest on a shaky assumption: that the artist, the institution, and the world occupy the same synchronized present. They do not.

The Language of the Apogee

In my own studio, I work with salvaged Perspex, exploring the interaction between perception, action, and material. Printing free from historical rules—ignoring whether a plate is perfectly straight or beveled—forces me to see the work differently every time. I have stopped chasing the “perfect edition,” which is often just a static, dead image. Instead, my focus has shifted to the sovereign space of the print itself—the territory where experimentation, friction, and discovery happen.

Through this practice, I have observed a perceptual interval:

t_0 + D

(The Sovereign Delay: the interval between perception and action).

By the time perception becomes action, the moment has already shifted. The artist does not inhabit institutional time; they inhabit this interval. While galleries, museums, and schools operate on coordinated schedules, the studio—both historically and today—is a temporal outlier. This delay is where true influence occurs.

The Studio as Sovereign Jurisdiction

At Two Dogs Art Space, I treat the studio as a laboratory for independence. I do not work according to rules imposed from outside. I negotiate with materials, perception, resistance, and time, tracing the friction that makes the work my own. Praxis is not compliance; it is negotiation. To impose institutional criteria too early collapses the delay and stifles discovery. Without delay, there is no risk; without risk, there is no innovation.

Material as Data: Witnessing Delay

Across printmaking, painting, drawing, or performance, the medium records the delay. The tool acts as a seismograph, capturing friction and resistance:

• Printmaking: Using salvaged Perspex introduces a field of prior events—scratches, marks, and resistance. The burr is the crystallization of delay; plate tone is atmospheric evidence. Cleaning the plate into uniform compliance erases the trace of negotiation that gives the work its origin.

• Painting & Drawing: Each stroke records a staggered response. To paint or draw all the way to the edges just to complete a “picture” often suffocates the scintillation. In drawing the landscape, I map the friction of my own nervous system, not the yard.

Innovation and the Right to Opacity

Innovation cannot occur where outcomes must be legible in advance. It requires opacity—a protected interval where the work is not yet synchronized with institutional time. I defend that interval. Engagement with the institution may follow, but it must follow sovereignty, not precede it.

Art does not emerge from the clock. It emerges from the perceptual structure between eye and hand. When the needle enters the Perspex, I am not following a manual—I am tracing delay and asserting jurisdiction over time itself. In that interval—between perception and action—the artist must remain free.

Peter Davidson - Study of delay, eyetracking and aging

pencil coloured pencil felt tip pen and pastel on paper

20 cm x 12 cm

Why Nothing Reacts Instantly

        A (age)

          ↓

t0 → [D] → [δ] → Reaction

      ↑      ↑

     α       F

 (attention) (fatigue)

          ↓

          T

 (training ↓ δ)

No system reacts instantly.

Not a person.
Not a robot.
Not a computer.
Not an AI.

Whenever something responds to something else, time has passed. That delay isn’t random. It follows a simple structure.

You can write it like this:

t_reaction = t0 + D + δ

That looks technical, but it isn’t complicated.

It just means:

The time something reacts
equals
the time the input happened
plus the time spent waiting
plus the time spent thinking.

That’s it.

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Step 1: Something Happens (t0)

This is the starting point.

A light turns on.
A sound is heard.
A message arrives.
A ball is thrown toward you.

That moment is t0 — the beginning.

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Step 2: The System Waits (D)

Before reacting, the system has to gather the information properly.

Your eyes need a fraction of a second to register light.
A microphone collects sound in tiny chunks.
A network collects packets before passing them along.

This waiting or collecting time is D.

It’s not “thinking” yet.
It’s stabilizing the input.

If you try to react before this stage finishes, you’re reacting to incomplete information.

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Step 3: The System Thinks (δ)

After the input is gathered, the system has to decide what to do.

Your brain chooses whether to move.
A robot calculates motor output.
A program runs an algorithm.
An AI runs its model.

That thinking time is δ.

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Step 4: The Reaction

Only after both steps happen do you get the response.

So the full story becomes:

t_reaction = t0 + D + δ

No reaction can happen before the waiting is done.
No reaction can happen before the thinking is done.

Every response is built from those two pieces of delay.

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Why This Matters

When something feels slow, people usually say, “The system is slow.”

But this model lets you ask a better question:

Is it waiting too long?
Or is it thinking too long?

If the waiting time (D) is large, maybe the buffer is too big.
If the thinking time (δ) is large, maybe the processing is inefficient.

Instead of blaming “slowness,” you can locate the cause.

 

Peter Davidson -pomegranate delay and scintillation

pencil, coloured pencil felt tip pen and pastel on paper

16 cm h x 10 cm w

The Sovereign Zone: Art Finished Through Delay and Scintillation

I’m building a language for artists — not for art historians, critics, academics, or bureaucrats. They’ve made their own languages, but those dialects fail to capture the actual delay between the optical and the spatial.

That delay manifests as a scintillation of influence — a vibration that only stops when the artist decides the work has reached its apogee. This is why an artist refuses to paint or draw all the way to the edges. To do so would be to finish a "graveyard image," dead and static.

The nature of that delay is where true influence happens. It’s the gap where every viewer sees the work differently. That isn’t a mistake; it is the fundamental nature of how we perceive space, light, and material.

Art Is Space

Sometimes people think of art as a line — something moving from past to future, from influence to mastery, from one artist to the next. But art does not unfold like that. Art is a space. It emerges through the marks we make in the studio, through the delay between seeing and making, between energy and matter.

In that interval, the studio becomes a field where perception negotiates with material. Each mark produces tension, vibration, and space. It scintillates. And the work only truly finishes when the artist knows to stop — before technique collapses the field.

Delay as Structure

The space of art does not pre-exist the work. It emerges through making. Between perception and execution, intention and materialization, there exists a thickness — an interval I call the praxis of delay.

This is not hesitation or indecision. It is structural. The line trembles, the brush hesitates, the pencil wavers — and in that trembling, scintillation appears. It is the visible proof of energy negotiating resistance.

Marks do not merely occupy space; they generate it. Each mark adds to a field that is alive, charged with tension. Influence is not linear; it presses spatially, overlapping temporalities, and resonances in the present moment.

The Edge of Life

Vitality in art depends on restraint, not endless addition. A painting or drawing does not die because it is unfinished. It dies when technique dominates resistance. When the hand obeys expectation, when form is confirmed rather than discovered, the field collapses.

The edges — the boundaries of the spatial field — are the most sensitive. Stopping before these edges die is not failure; it is completion through delay.

Historical examples show this clearly. Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà hovers between emergence and dissolution. Rough marble remains; forms are partially revealed; the material resists the artist’s hand. Leonardo’s unfinished drawings leave areas of searching lines beside intensely worked zones. Cézanne’s late landscapes leave patches of canvas exposed. In all cases, the works are finished at the precise moment when delay generates scintillation and the space remains alive.

Stopping Through Delay

Completion must be redefined. Conventional completion seeks polish, closure, and demonstration of skill. Completion through delay preserves tension, sustains resistance, and allows space to breathe. Scintillation is not a stage on the way to finish — it is the condition of true finish.

A work is complete when the vibration between perception and material stabilizes: when the field is fully charged but not collapsed, when the edges still pulse with possibility. Contemporary practice reflects this principle. Drawings and paintings that allow hesitation, tremor, and instability — rather than perfect alignment of hand and eye — produce a field that lives beyond execution. The studio praxis of delay creates the Sovereign Zone: a spatial interval in which energy, perception, and material continue to interact even after the mark is made. Mastery lies not in control, but in knowing when to stop.

The Sovereign Field

Art’s sovereignty comes not from authority, but from its structural independence: from the irreducible interval of delay, from the thickness of space produced by marks, and from the visible presence of scintillation. The artist’s role is not merely to depict or communicate, but to enact a field of tensions and resistances, to generate space through mark-making, and to recognize the moment when the work is fully realized — finished precisely through delay.

Art does not exist as a line along which influence travels. It exists as a spatial field of overlapping pressures. Studio praxis produces marks; those marks generate space; that space produces scintillation. The work stops just before technique can kill the field. In this suspension, the work is sovereign: alive, present, and complete.

Completion, in this sense, is not closure. It is vigilance, restraint, and awareness. A living field cannot be forced to perfection without killing its vitality. The Sovereign Zone exists wherever mark, delay, and space coincide. This is where art breathes, where it resonates, and where it endures.

I am not writing this to dismiss the efforts of the past. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Cézanne, and countless others have shown what is possible in the field of art. Rather, this is an effort to create a language for artists themselves — a vocabulary born from studio praxis, from delay, from marks that live in space and scintillate with energy. This language describes how art is made, how space is generated, and how influence moves, so artists can speak to the realities of making without relying on chronology, authority, or external validation.

The Physics of Resistance: Toward a Theory of Jelly

 

Peter Davidson - Eye Tracking Pomegranate

Pencil coloured pencil felt tip pen, pastel on paper 

18 cm h x 12 cm w

Drawing has always been described from the outside—through technique, history, or the rhetoric of accuracy—but rarely from within the lived friction of making. This essay begins from that interior ground. It proposes a new vocabulary for the felt physics of drawing, one built not from academic theory but from the stubborn, resistant, scintillating encounter between perception and material. By naming the substance of this encounter—what I call Jelly—I aim to give drawing a language equal to its own experience.

The Physics of Resistance: Toward a Theory of Jelly

I. The Myth of the Temporal Delay

In traditional studies of drawing, the space between the eye’s perception and the hand’s marking is often described as a temporal delay—a pause or a lag. This is a misunderstanding. The eye does not wait, and the hand does not hesitate. What occurs is a structural encounter: a field of resistance that arises the moment perceptual energy meets material form. This field is not empty; it is a substance. I call this substance Jelly.

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II. The Sovereign Zone and Scintillation

Between the motif and the mark exists the Sovereign Zone. This is a “thickness” of the present—a dense, non-linear space where perception, the body, the stubbornness of the material, and the emerging mark coexist without hierarchy. In this zone, the eye does not command the hand; they negotiate.

The evidence of this negotiation is visible in the mark itself. When a line appears unstable, fragmented, or flickering, it is not a failure of technique. It is Scintillation: the spark generated by the friction of making. Scintillation is proof of the Sovereign Zone in action.

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III. The Structural Constant: From Donatello to Whiteout

Jelly is a phenomenon that transcends epoch, style, and medium. It is a structural constant of praxis.

• Donatello encountered Jelly in the resistance of marble, where the stone pushed back against his physiological intent.

• Cézanne navigated it through planes of color, where the optical depth of the mountain collided with the flat reality of the canvas.

• William Coldstream sought to measure it in the deliberate discrepancies between the eye’s coordinates and the surface’s reality.

Whether the tool is a chisel, a brush, a texta, or whiteout, the resistance remains the same. The difficulty of drawing is not a hurdle to overcome; it is the realization of resistance. It is the physics of making:

J = I_optical ⊕ M_mark

In this equation, J (Jelly) is the result of optical energy (I_optical) negotiating with material form (M_mark). The ⊕ symbol represents the resistance and interaction that occurs in the Sovereign Zone.

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IV. Spatial Negotiation vs. Temporal Record

Adopting the framework of Jelly shifts the conversation from time to space. The artwork is no longer a record of a moment captured in time. It is a resolution of tension. The surface of a drawing does not store time; it stores distance made visible.

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V. Conclusion: A New Vernacular for Praxis

Defining the Sovereign Zone and the Jelly within it provides a precise lens for artists, curators, and historians. By moving beyond discussions of lineage or influence, we can understand art as a universal negotiation with material resistance. To understand Jelly is to understand that the mark is not merely a response to the world—it is a dialogue with it.