There is no goal to reach, no end to the process of balancing and rebalancing. Where mind is a verb, there can be no resting place, no end to the activity of expressive realization. There can only be an ongoing series of forever unfinished acts of expression. There is no pure truth, no complete truth, no eternal truth in the world of practical expression. There is no rising above the partialities of space and time.
Meanings made in space and time are forever subject to decay in space and time.
The mind may be able to imagine meanings that rise above spatial imperfection and temporal contingency, but the meanings made by the hand are irredeemably spatially imperfect and temporally contingent. The movement from mind to hand and back to mind that Eakins depicts is itself forever on the move. It won't sit still to have its picture painted, and when it is arrested pictorially, it reminds us of how experience keeps moving beyond any particular pictorial expression of it. There are few artists who more instinctively understood life as an endless, imperfect transaction between elegant, orderly ideas and unresolved, imperfect practices. Text Copyright 1999-2000 by Ray Carney.