Improvisation Within Discipline: Process Documentation of That Good Night
Samuel Palmer
Ritualistic Repetition and Unconscious Manifestation
In the creative process, repetitive brushstrokes gain ritualistic meaning. This repetition isn't mechanical copying but spiritual activity like prayer or meditation. Especially when I think of things I desire but cannot reach, repetitive movements become a kind of comfort and confirmation. Each repetition reinforces the reality of certain emotions, like how repeated chanting gives words magical power.
Giorgio Agamben's discussion of "gesture" provides theoretical support for understanding this repetition. He argues that gesture is neither means nor end but "the display of mediality"—it shows possibility itself (Agamben, 2000, p.57). In my repetitive brushstrokes, what's displayed isn't the image goal to be reached but the possibility of the painting act itself, the infinite potential where body and emotion meet.
This ritualistic repetition also creates a special temporal dimension. In repetition, linear time is suspended, replaced by a cyclical, spiraling experience of time. Each repetition is both return and advance, both confirmation and change. This is like Benjamin's Jetztzeit (now-time)—the crystallization of past and present in a specific moment (Benjamin, 1968).
The Sisyphean Act of Seeing: Repetition as Meaning
My practice—painting night after night, revisiting similar scenes—is a Sisyphean labour. As Camus writes, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” (Camus, 1955: 123). Accepting repetition and acknowledging inevitable difficulty become ways to generate meaning. Each seemingly identical night scene carries subtle emotional variation; every return to the canvas is a new interpretation of eternal recurrence.
This approach echoes the Daoist idea of wu wei—“non-action that allows everything to be done” (Tao Te Ching, ch. 37). It is not passive withdrawal but an active letting-be, allowing the landscape to reveal its own essence. In Chinese literati painting, artists such as Ni Zan and Bada Shanren used emptiness and restraint to create fullness of spirit. Such “progress through retreat” takes on new political meaning today: to paint unpeopled landscapes, to choose silence, is itself a response to a noisy world. As Sontag reminds us, “Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech” (Sontag, 1969: 11).
Genealogy of Solitude:
From Hermitage to Contemporary Withdrawal
The act of withdrawing into landscape has a long history. From medieval hermits retreating into wilderness for spiritual purification to the British Romantic notion of genius loci—Wordsworth’s meditative walks in the Lake District and John Clare’s tender gaze upon the fields—place has long been a generator of emotion and meaning (Norberg-Schulz, 1980: 5, 18).
Thoreau’s Walden transformed solitude into an ethical and political act: retreating to nature was not escape but a means to recover moral clarity and autonomy (Thoreau, 2004). In our time, writers like Robert Macfarlane (The Old Ways, 2012) and Nan Shepherd (The Living Mountain, 2011) extend this tradition with ecological awareness and critique of anthropocentrism.
In my practice, “withdrawal is also a political stance.” Keeping distance preserves critical vision; silence becomes another form of participation. This retreat is not absence but a different mode of presence. It acknowledges that, in an age of over-connection, solitude is both rare and necessary.