Sketching in Ayala + thoughts on Nietzsche's real and apparent worlds [ESSAY]

By: Jessica Bonifacio

I sketched in Makati for the International Day of Books. One booth sold a sketchpad for a mere fifty pesos, so I took the pleasure of sitting on a rock across the McMicking Memorial, recreating the surrounding trees with a pencil.

Art makes bare the differences between our mind’s conjured image of an object versus how it appears in real life. 

When I think of a tree, for example, my mind thinks of an uninteresting wide trunk, all the details and gradations in the leaves. But sitting in Ayala and drawing on-location has made me see that what makes a tree appear a tree is not so much the leaves but the trunk and branches: the flowing, slithering, reaching hands of trees improperly formed and unique in angles. 

If you give me a tree without a trunk, then I will not see a tree, but just a pile of greenery; but give me a tree without leaves, and I will still see a tree, albeit a dead one. In short: what my mind deems important is not the same as what reality suggests as essential in representing a particular object.

I love the critical, observant lens through which I see the world when I’m drawing from life; how the images in my head are proven wrong; how the sky I think of as blue becomes white and lime and pink and purple.

The disparity between what my mind sees and what the world is reminds me of Nietzsche's ideas on the abstract halving of worlds: one real and one apparent. Think of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, how the "real" world is illustrated as an inaccessible realm beyond a chained person's peripheral - or Christianity, how our lived days on Earth become a preparation for what is stamped as infinitely more significant: the afterlife.

Nietzsche argued that the excessive significance placed on the supposed "true" reality diminishes the quality of life lived in the "apparent" day-to-day. 

Art gives an artist a methodology to clearly distinguish between their apparent aesthetic view of the world and its actuality. However, the dilemma is in calculating how much technical accuracy vs. creative interpretation must be lent to art to make it striking or meaningful.

According to Nietzsche's philosophy, making art to simulate a scene in its naked truth may not only be impossible but may also diminish the expression of how one subjectively experiences the world.

Maybe there is a need to abstract, especially in a world ripe with photography.

I find myself situated right between abstraction and realism. I'm inspired by the great impressionists Claude Monet and Édouard Manet, who followed rules of light and shadow, but brought vividness to their paintings through short, sharp brushstrokes and exaggerated colors.

Maybe I'll be back in Ayala next year, with the same sketchbook, painting a different scene. While I observed trees yesterday, I still only have a scant idea of how rocks look in truth.