Peter Davidson

Hanging pumpkin seed

pencil, coloured pencil, felt tip pen  on242 g  paper FO

The Sovereign Framework: An Epistemology of the Inside-Out - a developing new language for artists

The traditional structures of fine art—art history, criticism, academia, and curation—have long operated from the outside in. From the Renaissance through the modern “isms”—Baroque, Romanticism, the Pre-Raphaelites, Impressionism, Cubism, and Pop Art—the dominant narrative has been built through external annotation. Even Postmodernism, which claims rupture, often fails to manifest in the physical fact of paint; it survives primarily in language, in theory, in text layered over the work rather than emerging from within it.

The finished artwork is typically treated as a fixed artifact: categorized, dated, interpreted, and archived. It becomes what I call a static image—stilled for examination. Yet this bears little resemblance to the lived reality of the studio. For the artist, the studio is not a site of historical record but a black box of biological necessity. There exists a fundamental delay between the optics of seeing and the spatial act of marking—a gap where history, as an external narrative, does not operate.

While art historians and critics have produced extraordinary scholarship, their work remains external to the event of making. Artists stand at the coal face of material encounter, yet they have rarely possessed a formal language grounded in their own physiology. Instead, they borrow terms from art history’s lineage of movements and stylistic categories. The Sovereign Framework proposes something different: an epistemology built from the inside out.

At its foundation is a simple recognition: we are born with a pulse, not a clock. The art world runs on chronological time—deadlines, exhibitions, markets, biennales—but the artist works within internal time. The pulse is biological, irregular, elastic. It accelerates in the heat of making and slows in contemplation. Within this framework, the only meaningful measure of duration is the tempo of the body itself. Sovereignty begins with this refusal to synchronize.

From this emerges what I call the Davidson Hypothesis: the discovery of delay. The artist never encounters the world in pure immediacy. There is always an interval between perception and action. Formally, this can be expressed as:

t₀ → t₀ + D

Here, t₀ represents the originating event, and D represents the delay. We never meet the world at t₀. We meet it only at t₀ + D. This delay is not emptiness; it is thickness. It is elastic, resistant, viscous. I call it the Jelly.

The Jelly is the space where memory, intention, motor function, and matter collide. It is the interval where perception becomes embodied. Rather than striving for the fiction of real-time accuracy, the artist becomes honest to the lag. The artwork is not a record of the world as it appeared; it is a trace of the body negotiating delay.

This principle becomes most visible when two artists respond to the same stimulus. If both encounter an event at t₀, their responses will nonetheless diverge:

Artist A: t₀ + D₁

Artist B: t₀ + D₂

Because D₁ ≠ D₂, their marks cannot coincide. Each mark becomes a seismic record of a distinct biological interval. The difference is not stylistic; it is physiological. The studio thus becomes a laboratory of offset realities, where material intelligence is observed through resistance—how charcoal drags, how paint hesitates, how the hand trembles.

Authenticity, within this view, is not mastery over material but surrender to latency. Every medium carries resistance. Watercolor bleeds unpredictably into paper; oil paint drags; digital tools introduce micro-lags between stylus and screen. Delay is not a defect to be overcome. It is evidence of life. The tremor in a line is not failure; it is the nervous system navigating matter.

As this research into delay deepens, another phenomenon becomes visible: scintillation. Scintillation is the shimmer produced when perception and action are slightly misaligned. If perception and action are imagined as two waves,

P(t) = sin(ωt)

A(t) = sin(ω(t − D))

the delay D produces phase difference. That phase difference generates interference—a ripple between intention and execution. That ripple is vitality. When D collapses toward zero—when technique smooths over delay entirely—the vibration ceases. The work becomes overly resolved, overly complete. It dies.

The presence of scintillation is therefore a vital sign. It signals that the sovereign zone remains active—that the work still carries the tremor of embodied encounter.

This understanding also transforms what it means for a work to be finished. Completion is not polish. It is not saturation of the canvas edge to edge. A work is finished when the energetic field reaches apogee—when tension stabilizes at maximum charge. In conceptual terms, this is the moment when the change in energy over time equals zero:

dE/dt = 0

Not decline, not exhaustion, but equilibrium at peak intensity. To push beyond this is often to kill the field—to create a graveyard image legible to institutions but emptied of vibration. The sovereign artist stops at the open edge, preserving breath within the work.

Because this framework is intended for artists rather than interpreters, the site of its operation must function as a non-place. It resists three external pressures: interpretation, chronology, and spectatorship. The work is not “about” something; it is an event of embodied delay. It is not organized by date but by vibration and pulse. It is not created for the outside-in gaze but for the integrity of the making act itself.

The Sovereign Framework does not depict the world. It enacts a field of tensions and resistances. It acknowledges that art is always late, always offset, always shimmering within the Jelly of perception. Rather than denying delay, it centers it. Rather than masking latency, it studies it. Rather than polishing away vibration, it protects it.

Art, in this view, is the honest response of a living body—biological, delayed, and sovereign.

Studio Praxis: Notes Toward a Theory of Perceptual Delay - An Essay

 

Peter Davidson - Eye tracking sliced pumpkin

Pencil, coloured pencil, gouache, felt tip pen on 242 g paper FO

In the Davidson Hypothesis, art does not unfold through time — it exists in space. Cause and effect are real, but they are local, relational interactions, not stages on a clock. Every mark, gesture, and pigment strike is a collision producing residue. The canvas is not a record of moments passed; it is a field of interactions.

This inquiry begins not with art history but with studio experience — the act of seeing, hesitating, and making a mark. What follows is a working model derived from repeated encounters with perception under pressure.

I. The Problem of the Interval

In the studio, perception does not arrive as a stable image. It appears as fluctuation — a brief intensification, a shimmer between color, edge, and light. This moment feels volatile. It carries charge.

Yet by the time the hand moves, the moment has already shifted.

This suggests a structural condition: the painter never acts in the present. There is always an interval between perceptual event and inscription.

II. The Davidson Hypothesis (t₀ → t₀ + D)

The Davidson Hypothesis (t₀ → t₀ + D) proposes that artists cannot act on the present directly but respond to reality after a structural delay — the interval in which perception becomes action.

t₀: the perceptual event (light striking the retina).

D: the physiological, neurological, and mechanical delay within the body.

t₀ + D: the moment of inscription.

The painter does not record t₀.

The painter records a residue at t₀ + D.

If D remains small, the residue retains intensity.

If D expands, perceptual energy dissipates.

This can be described metaphorically as energetic decay:

Where E₀ represents initial perceptual intensity and λ describes the rate at which sensation stabilizes into memory.

Under this model, painting is not immediate transcription but delayed interception.

III. The Studio as Laboratory

Two Dogs Art Space functions as a laboratory for this condition. While we share one yard, we do not share one perceptual present. Each body operates within its own D. Our realities are slightly offset — not chronologically, but structurally.

Art therefore emerges not from shared time but from differentiated delay.

Studio praxis becomes epistemological: a way of knowing grounded not in representation, but in the mechanics of perception itself. The painting is evidence of how a body negotiates its interval.

IV. Energetic Transfer

Painting can be understood as a transduction of light energy:

Light frequency becomes material density — oil, wax, pigment. Because of the interval, the painting is never a copy of the present. It is the materialization of delayed sensation.

The operative question becomes:

How much delay can a painting tolerate before scintillation — the flicker of perception — resolves into reconstruction?

V. Scale as Temporal Compression

One response has been to reduce scale.

Working on an 18 cm × 18 or 14  cm wooden panel or paper shortens the physical travel of the hand and compresses mechanical delay. Spatial compression becomes temporal compression.

“Scale is inversely proportional to focus.”

The aim is not smallness but intensity — a macro scintillation within a micro motif.

VI. Duration and Calibration

The work of Euan Uglow offers a productive counterpoint.

Uglow’s method involved prolonged observation, extensive measurement, and paintings developed over years. Rather than minimizing delay, his practice stabilized it through proportional systems and calibration.

Measurement does not eliminate D; it formalizes it.

The result is structural coherence and durational rigor. Under the Delay Hypothesis, however, extended D transforms the nature of what is captured. The painting becomes an architecture of sustained looking rather than a volatile interception.

This is not failure. It is a different optimization.

One practice privileges durational structure.

Another privileges perceptual immediacy.

The tension between them clarifies the central threshold:

At what point does delay cease to carry the original flicker?

(For context on Uglow’s durational rigor, see the 2026 MK Gallery review: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/feb/13/euan-uglow-review-mk-gallery-milton-keynes)

VII. Open Conclusion

Every studio positions itself somewhere along the axis of delay.

Some extend time to secure proportion.

Some compress time to preserve scintillation.

The present inquiry does not close this question. It tests it.

How small must D become for a mark to retain perceptual voltage?

How long can D extend before sensation resolves into architecture?

The studio remains a site of experimentation — not to defeat time, but to work at the edge where perception is still alive.

Grotesque Profile - Leonardo da Vinci - The Scintillation of Delay in Drawing

Grotesque Profile Leonardo da Vinci, : Renaissance period  Drawing

 Pen and brown (iron gall) ink, and washes

 by

Leonardo da Vinci, Grotesque Profile, c. 1480–1490. Pen and brown ink with wash. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In observing Grotesque Profile, one immediately notices the slanting ink traces that fall from the upper left to the lower right—unmistakable evidence of Leonardo’s left‑handedness. These strokes retain the residue of imagination, a lingering energy that still resonates across epotic space, a zone that traverses different eras of life on Earth. They scintillate with fluid assurance, born from an inner light that entered through the eye and was transformed, through studio praxis, into living matter on the page.

The drawing operates as a spatial translation of thought. Marks, washes, and forms are arranged with such restraint that even the negative space feels intentional. Leonardo understood precisely where a wash would bloom into its fullest expressive force. Here the work reaches a quiet apogee: a convergence of drawing system, imagination, and perception that transcends its materials.

The traces flowing from his goose quill reveal a refined aesthetic intelligence. The flexible nib responds to pressure with extraordinary sensitivity: a firm downward stroke asserts the weight of the elongated chin; a gentle release allows the line to taper into a near-evaporation. Such modulation requires neurological memory—forms transmitted from eye to hand through a disciplined nervous system. The drawing records this embodied perception.

Leonardo’s economy of line is mesmerizing. He pulls forward only what is structurally essential—the mandible, the cheekbones—with surgical clarity. The subtle wash beneath the chin conveys both gravity and deformation. In applying it, he accepted the risk of diluted pigment flowing unpredictably, yet he trusted his studio-honed instinct. He knew exactly how much was enough.

There is a quivering system within Leonardo’s practice that remains difficult to comprehend. Consider the few teeth in the mouth: seemingly minor, yet they function as anchoring marks that stabilize the entire image. Without that fragile constellation of ink, the drawing would lose coherence.

This observation supports a theory I call Forensic Rhopography—the disciplined act of looking at what is easily overlooked. It is a vital component of drawing intelligence, allowing the artist to recognize the precise moment when a work reaches its peak charge. In Grotesque Profile, Leonardo did not merely depict a face; he captured the scintillation of character through minute, peripheral details.

Drawing is never easy. To approximate the masters requires sustained looking—studying the works that contain the knowledge we seek. when visiting museums today, this mode of learning feels wanting, though it remains the engine of artistic imagination. It is within this interval of attentive delay—when the eye absorbs and translates—that imagination crosses into form. Leonardo understood this deeply. Here, drawing emerges not from speed or certainty, but from the patient cultivation of perception. Scintillation appears at the threshold between intensity and dissolution—the precise moment when seeing becomes matter.

The Epoch Without Time: Art as Spatial Interaction

 

egg still life II
oil wax acrylic on wooden panel
18 cm x 18 cm

In the Davidson Hypothesis, art does not unfold through time — it exists in space. Cause and effect are real, but they are local, relational interactions, not stages on a clock. Every mark, gesture, and pigment strike is a collision producing residue. The canvas is not a record of moments passed; it is a field of interactions.

At the heart of this process is Δs, the “Scintillation of Delay.” Δs is the charged interval between perception and action — a structural space where energy gathers before becoming form. The Scintillation — the slight tremor or vitality of the line — is the trace of this crossing, the material fingerprint of perception converting into mark.

Inside Δs lies Optical Jelly, the dense, reactive medium of sensation, memory, and expectation. It stores uncertainty as potential energy. When saturation is reached, the mark emerges as a fossilized residue of perception, not a depiction of the external world. Art is the crystallization of interaction, not the shadow of reality.

Even decay — pigment fading, paint cracking, canvas stretching — is a spatial event, not a temporal one. Residue persists because collisions have occurred. Each observer reconstructs influence differently, activating the work’s structure anew. Art survives in structure and interaction, not in the passage of years.

For the artist, intensity replaces duration. Saturation replaces labor. The studio becomes a laboratory of collision and conversion — a space where perception, material, and gesture meet to leave lasting residue. Each mark is a trace of potential released, a crystallization of energy, and a testament to what happens when the organism, material, and space collide.

Time is not a force. Only interaction and residue are real.

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.