More stuff learned it seems

Scince this autumn, when we went to NY, and I spent 5 hours in the Metropolitan Museum, I've pondered the exhibition of Giorgio Mordani works in the Lehman collection. I find these simple still lifes and few landscapes that he did between 1920 and the early 1960s fascinating: they're grayed out, with some limited color range and contrast; the brushwork in the still lifes is is made of long strokes, left to right, with some up and down movement. In the Landscapes the brushwork is more vigorous.
What I think he does is what Merleau Ponty and other positivists talk about "describing more to understand better." To Morandi you have to look beyond the repetition of subject matter and the tonality. What he's done is limit himself. Part of that limitation is to ask himself What it is that he needs to do in a painting - what is a painting? So with this limitation of artistic vocabulary he set out to translate the intensity of his gaze onto the canvas: that is, the canvas becomes the site of a translation of the object through the subjectivity of the painter. For Morandi I think the task is that this gaze not be a glancing blow - in a way his method is the opposite of Monet's: not impressionistic though certainly not given over to detail. I feel I really know the objects Morandi paints, even though the duration of his application is belied by paucity of detail. what comes through in paint is the density and silence of the objects and their arrangement.
What I've pondered is how to apply this to myself. Certainly it's a lesson in paint - and paint is a lesson in life. I ask myself What is essential to me? What can I limit myself to? The thing is not to paint Morandis anymore than Morandi painted Cezannes or Cezanne painted Pousins. Morandi's work is entirely unique to himself. Much as Sean Scully's work is: you know what you'll get with him, but you're surprised all the same.
And so it is.
Along with this I've pondered Donald Kuspit's Art Criticism issue of the last year - a survey of the last 90 or so years of art making. I'm surprised at how conversant he is with Freud Klein and Bion; and it's that association he makes with art as healing that strikes me in his whole argument. Basically he argues against the formalism that took hold in midcentury and the ironic vantage point that brackets that formalism in the 1920s and the 1990s. I've approached art in formalistic terms for many years (the subject of painting is paint, the materiality of the materials, etc) and I have to say that something in Kuspit's argument touched me. Certainly I've thought of my art as a psychic necessity for me but have not considered whether it might heal those viewing it. Jami has helped me here, pointing out how Out of Chaos, the painting I painted in chapel, affected the congregation and her. It's true, people approached me afterwards and commented on how moving it was to watch during the week's services the painting change and unfold.
Kuspit's text has made me look more closely at Beuys and Rauschenberg and Hesse, as well as wondering what I've accepted too readily in Johns and Duchamp.