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Note: I am an artist, not a philosopher or scientist. Everything described in this essay arises directly from my studio practice—from drawing, painting, and the perceptual dynamics involved in making. My use of terms such as “micro‑phenomenological” and “nano‑liminal” reflects my own painterly interpretation of experience, not a formal application of academic or scientific methods.
This painting does not depend on correspondence to a particular place in Japan, nor on seasonal accuracy. It was made in mid‑summer, yet through painting it has become a frozen landscape: cherry‑blossom pinks suspended against cold atmospheric blues, pale viridians travelling down hillsides, and intermittent golden illuminations emerging through an industrial haze. The observed world is not reproduced but reconstructed through delay. I understand this process through Apeiron: an inexhaustible field of sensorial residue in which the experience of seeing persists beyond the original moment of perception. What enters the eye is never transferred intact into consciousness. Between encounter and painterly response lies an interval of neurological processing, filtering, memory, imagination and delay. The visual event has already changed by the time it becomes available as experience. Painting begins within this instability.
The Residue of Perception
The original sight is not the object of painting. What becomes available is what remains: tones, textures, luminosities, colour relationships, atmospheric impressions, fragments of movement and barely distinguishable sensations that have survived the passage from observation into memory and imagination. These residues cannot be returned to their original condition. They can only be reimagined. The materials of painting become instruments within this process: palette knife, brush, oil, wax, medium and the acrylic underpainting that establishes a provisional structure. None simply translates perception. Each interferes. Each introduces resistance, accident, density, transparency, viscosity, speed and delay. The painting becomes a site where perceptual residue encounters material behaviour. This encounter produces the painterly mark. A short brushstroke loaded with cold cherry‑blossom pink is not merely an image of a flower. A long viridian stroke descending across a hill is not simply vegetation or terrain. A soft ultramarine passage in the sky does not merely describe atmospheric space. These marks are traces of an encounter between what has been seen and what painting is capable of making visible.
Micro‑Phenomenological and Nano‑Liminal Traces
I describe some of these traces as micro‑phenomenological and nano‑liminal. By this I mean sensations and differences operating at the threshold of conscious recognition: things that may be registered without being completely identified, understood or verbally articulated. They are not random, but neither are they fully predetermined. They emerge within a field of uncertainty between perception, memory, imagination and material action. This uncertainty is essential. The painter does not possess complete knowledge of why one mark demands another, why a particular pink suddenly becomes necessary, or why a particular blue activates a dormant area of the panel. The developing painting acts back upon perception. Once a mark exists, it becomes something newly seen. That seeing generates another residue, which influences the next mark. A recursive loop therefore begins: world → perception → delay → residue → paint → renewed perception → further residue → further paint. The painting becomes both the consequence of perception and a new source of perception.
Apeiron as an Open Field
This is where Apeiron becomes particularly important to my practice. Apeiron is not simply an archive of remembered images. It is an open and continually transforming field. The residue of one perception encounters the residue of another; an emerging paint trace modifies what can subsequently be seen; what is seen within the painting returns again to the field of perceptual possibility. The process has no absolute beginning and no definitive endpoint. The landscape that initiated the painting gradually becomes entangled with the painting itself. Consequently, observational painting is not, for me, a matter of reproducing an external scene. Observation is the initial disturbance that sets a larger process into motion. The external world provides the encounter, but the painting develops through what happens to that encounter after it has entered perception and undergone delay. This is also why imagination is not opposed to observation. Imagination is necessary precisely because direct perception is already insufficient. By the time the painter attempts to reconstruct what was seen, the original perceptual event has disappeared. What remains is a complex residue, and imagination becomes the means through which that residue can be materially reactivated. The painting therefore occupies an unstable territory between seeing and remembering, sensation and imagination, recognition and uncertainty. I am interested in the point at which these categories become difficult to separate. The term nano‑liminal is useful here not as a claim about a literally measurable microscopic phenomenon, but as a way of describing extraordinarily fine perceptual thresholds at which these differences occur. There are moments in painting when a colour, texture or directional mark seems almost imperceptible and yet alters the entire perceptual field. Such traces may be too slight to describe independently, but their cumulative effect can transform the experience of the whole painting.
Cézanne and the Recursive Painterly Event
Paul Cézanne’s Houses on the Hill (1900–06, McNay Art Museum) offers a useful historical analogue for this recursive process. Cézanne’s landscapes were rooted in sustained engagement with nature, yet his mature practice transformed observed experience through colour, structure and the organisation of the brushstroke. The National Gallery of Art describes Cézanne’s approach as one in which observation of nature was combined with a highly deliberate organisation of colour and form. I do not propose that Houses on the Hill can be definitively divided into an outdoor phase and a studio phase, nor that every visible mark can be assigned to one or the other. Instead, the painting allows me to think about observation as the beginning of an extended process in which perception and painterly decision continually interact. The muted greens, greys, blues and earth colours of Houses on the Hill create a subdued atmosphere that can be experienced as cold or wintry. Yet these colours need not be understood simply as meteorological information. In Cézanne’s mature landscapes, colour becomes structural: it establishes relationships, constructs forms and reorganises the visible world through the internal logic of the painting. His brushwork is equally important. The characteristic constructive strokes do not merely describe the objects they touch. They participate in building the forms of the landscape, allowing individual marks to operate simultaneously as representations and as independent coloured shapes on the surface. This is close to what I mean by recursion. A stroke does not merely add information to an already established image. It changes the conditions under which the next stroke can be perceived and made. The painting consequently becomes an evolving perceptual field: observation initiates the process, but subsequent perception occurs through the painting itself. Cézanne therefore provides a historical analogue for my understanding of the recursive painterly event. His work demonstrates that painting from observation need not mean the faithful preservation of an initial visual encounter. Observation can become transformed through colour, structure, bodily gesture and repeated reconsideration. What begins as contact with the landscape can become an increasingly complex negotiation between what is seen and what painting makes possible. In Houses on the Hill, the landscape is therefore more than a geographical subject. It becomes a field in which perception is reorganised through material decisions. The observed world remains present, but it is no longer separable from the act of painting.
The Studio as Micro‑Phenomenological Laboratory
The complexity of this system lies in its inability to be reduced to one explanation. Phenomenology can investigate the structure of experience. Neuroscience can investigate the mechanisms of perception and neural processing. Material studies can investigate the behaviour of pigments, binders, waxes and surfaces. Painting itself investigates these questions through another form of knowledge: the knowledge produced by making. I do not see the painter as waiting for science to explain what painting already knows. Rather, painting becomes another site of investigation — a practical and material form of inquiry into perception. The studio becomes a kind of micro‑phenomenological laboratory. But it is a laboratory without clean separation between observer and experiment. The observer is also the maker; the experiment alters the object being observed; and the object, once altered, changes the observer’s subsequent perception. Every new mark modifies the conditions under which the next mark becomes possible. This is the recursive complexity that interests me. The painting is therefore not simply an accumulation of decisions. It is an evolving perceptual system in which each decision becomes part of the conditions for the next. A colour placed in one area may alter the perceived temperature of another. A directional stroke may activate a spatial relationship that was previously dormant. A transparent glaze may obscure, intensify or destabilise what lies beneath it. Material action becomes another form of seeing.
Frozen Cherry Blossom in Snowy Landscape
The painting is therefore not a frozen representation of a moment in Japan. It is a record of an ongoing negotiation between the remembered world, perceptual residue and the material intelligence of paint. The apparent snow, the cherry‑blossom pinks, the viridian hills, the ultramarine atmosphere and the flickering industrial gold do not necessarily belong to one literal season or location. They are residues that have become reorganised through painting. In this sense, Frozen Cherry Blossom in Snowy Landscape describes less a geographical reality than a perceptual condition. The cherry blossom has become frozen because the original moment of seeing has been arrested, delayed and materially reconstructed. The snow is not necessarily meteorological snow; it is the accumulated whiteness, coldness and atmospheric suspension produced through the transformation of visual memory. Summer has entered winter through the temporal distortions of painting. Apeiron is therefore the space in which these transformations remain possible. It is the inexhaustibility of sensation after the original sensation has disappeared; the persistence of what cannot be fully recovered; the field in which perceptual fragments continue to resonate and generate new possibilities. Painting does not resolve this residue. It gives it somewhere to continue. And perhaps this is the fundamental reason I paint: not to recover what was seen, but to follow what remains after seeing has already become something else.
知覚の残滓（Residue of Perception）
この絵画は、日本の特定の場所との対応性にも、季節の正確さにも依存していません。制作したのは真夏ですが、絵画の過程を通じてそれは凍った風景へと変化しました。桜色のピンクは冷たい大気のブルーに浮かび、淡いビリジアンが丘を流れ落ち、工業的な霞の中から断続的に金色の光が立ち上がります。観察された世界は再現されるのではなく、遅延によって再構成されます。
私はこのプロセスを「アペイロン（Apeiron）」──知覚の経験が最初の視覚的遭遇を越えて持続する、尽きることのない感覚的残滓の場──として理解しています。目に入ったものは決してそのまま意識へ移されることはありません。出会いと絵画的応答のあいだには、神経的処理、フィルタリング、記憶、想像、そして遅延の区間が存在します。視覚的出来事は、経験として利用可能になる時点ですでに変化しているのです。絵画はこの不安定性の中で始まります。
元の光景そのものが絵画の対象ではありません。利用可能になるのは、残されたもの──色調、質感、輝度、色の関係性、大気的印象、動きの断片、そして観察から記憶と想像へ移行する過程でかろうじて生き残った微細な感覚です。これらの残滓は元の状態に戻すことはできません。再想像するしかないのです。
絵画の素材──パレットナイフ、筆、油絵具、ワックス、メディウム、そして暫定的な構造を与えるアクリル下地──は、このプロセスの道具となります。どれも知覚を単純に翻訳することはありません。それぞれが干渉し、抵抗、偶然性、密度、透明性、粘性、速度、そして遅延をもたらします。絵画は、知覚の残滓が物質の振る舞いと出会う場となります。この出会いが絵画的な「筆触」を生み出します。
冷たい桜色を含んだ短い筆触は、単なる花のイメージではありません。丘を下る長いビリジアンのストロークは、単なる植生や地形ではありません。空の柔らかなウルトラマリンの帯は、単なる大気空間の描写ではありません。これらの筆触は、「見られたもの」と「絵画が可視化し得るもの」との遭遇の痕跡なのです。
微小現象学的・ナノ・リミナルな痕跡
私はこれらの痕跡の一部を「微小現象学的」「ナノ・リミナル」と呼びます。それは、意識的認識の閾（しきい）に位置する感覚や差異──完全に識別されたり理解されたり言語化されたりする前に、かすかに登録されるもの──を指します。それらは偶然ではありませんが、完全に予定されたものでもありません。知覚、記憶、想像、物質的行為のあいだの不確実性の場で生じます。
この不確実性こそが重要です。画家は、なぜある筆触が次の筆触を要求するのか、なぜ特定のピンクが突然必要になるのか、なぜあるブルーが画面の休眠していた領域を活性化するのかを完全には知りません。制作中の絵画は知覚に作用し返します。ひとつの筆触が存在すると、それは新たに「見られるもの」となり、その見え方が次の残滓を生み、それが次の筆触を導きます。
こうして再帰的なループが始まります：
世界 → 知覚 → 遅延 → 残滓 → 絵具 → 新たな知覚 → 新たな残滓 → さらなる絵具
絵画は知覚の結果であると同時に、新たな知覚の源にもなるのです。
アペイロンという開かれた場
ここでアペイロンが特に重要になります。アペイロンは単なる記憶されたイメージのアーカイブではありません。それは開かれ、絶えず変化する場です。ある知覚の残滓が別の残滓と出会い、新たに生じた筆触がその後に見えるものを変え、絵画の中で見えるものが再び知覚の可能性の場へ戻っていきます。
このプロセスには絶対的な始点も終点もありません。絵画を始めるきっかけとなった風景は、徐々に絵画そのものと絡み合っていきます。したがって、私にとって観察絵画とは外部の景色を再現することではありません。観察は、より大きなプロセスを動かす最初の「撹乱」にすぎません。
外界は遭遇を提供しますが、絵画はその遭遇が知覚へ入り、遅延を経た後に何が起こるかによって発展します。だからこそ、想像は観察と対立するものではありません。直接的知覚はすでに不十分だからです。画家が見たものを再構成しようとする時点で、元の知覚的出来事はすでに消えています。残るのは複雑な残滓であり、想像はその残滓を物質的に再活性化する手段となります。
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