“What does ‘speaking about painting’ mean? I believe that it means precisely: forming concepts that are in direct relation with painting and with painting alone.”
Things have not been going well in the studio for some time. It’s been a scene of misery: chaos, catastrophe and failure.
And now Deleuze tells me (or is he just reminding me?) that Chaos, Catastrophe and the ever-present likelihood of Failure are the essence of the act of painting. I suddenly feel much better.
Deleuze is not speaking from the vantage point of a viewer or connoisseur—and he’s not a painter. It is a startling leap of the imagination.
On Painting is the transcription of a series of lectures Deleuze gave at University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis in 1968. It was open to the public and Deleuze spoke with only a few brief notes and a couple of slides. A lecture on painting without slides! (I’ve put in a few of the paintings he talked about but maybe I shouldn’t have.) He assumed the audience would be as familiar with the painters, or more so, than himself. This has the wonderful effect of forcing the reader to open their own pictorial memory bank to make sense of what he is saying.
Do I make sense of what Deleuze is saying? Not completely—some of it strikes me as nonsense but Deleuze gave permission for all of the thoughts and excitement that did come to my mind:
Reading philosophy means doing two things at once: it means being very attentive to the linkage of concepts, that’s what philosophical reading is: but there is no philosophical reading without there being nonphilosophical reading. And the nonphilosophical reading, without which the philosophical reading remains dead, provides all kinds of sensible intuitions that must emerge within you, but extremely rudimentary sensible intuitions, and because of this, are extremely lively.
My urge to be a painter comes from one thing that Deleuze circles but never quite says—paintings stop time. The moments of intense beauty and emotion in prose, music and films have to be reread, or played again; there is a continuing feeling of loss—but a painting is always completely there. What I hadn’t thought about consciously is that this is true also while painting them.
In Deleuze’s reading, Chaos is there from the start—on the canvas before a single stroke of paint. It is the chaos that was there before the gods made the world, the chaos before we recognize what we are seeing—that the world is made from dancing atoms—maybe even the chaos of our present life.
It is also the germinal chaos containing every possibility. My paintings often start with an attempt to create a field of possibility with random marks and colors but even if I am painting from life, the chaos is there and this is crucial to what Deleuze is saying.
He begins his description of Catastrophe by referring to paintings in which the subject is a literal catastrophe, Turner’s paintings of an avalanche for example, and then he talks about Dutch still lives with overturned glasses and Cezanne’s unstable pots. Ergo the composition of a painting, no matter how serene, is a balancing act.
(Deleuze mentions Rembrandt’s glasses in the next paragraph. Rembrandt didn’t paint still lives, but no matter; we all know what he means.)
Deleuze posits that the way a painter finds a way out of chaos is the Diagram. I instinctively rejected this word to describe it but as he reiterated it in different ways I began to see it as what I might call a thread or a rhythm or a physical moment in the chaos, an idea that leads to an attempt to develop it—so ok—a diagram. *
Why is it so hard to move forward at this point?—The Cliché. Deleuze describes the Cliché as existing on the canvas before the painter starts. I attempt to create a new chaos to work with and even the chaos I create looks terribly familiar.
I theorize that Deleuze knows cliché quite well from his work as a philosopher because this expression of his thoughts is very heartfelt.
“War against the cliché! Later he calls it “a frightening struggle” and he is so not wrong.
(Paraphrasing a longer passage about why we have to come up with something new in painting and philosophy: It is not because paintings or philosophies become outdated, it is because they responded to other contexts or problems that no longer exist.)
I start to develop an idea—a hint of a diagram—inspired by the germinal chaos and then experience a kind of nausea. It’s a mindfuck because it’s not only preconceived notions or timeworn solutions—it’s even your own ideas that become clichés simply because you have used them before. Deleuze describes the “constant necessity to clean the canvas” and that applies to what might look like to others as the blank canvas but isn’t and all through the painting process: it’s destroying as much as constructing.
If someone devotes his or her whole life to painting and struggling against the cliché, this is no mere academic exercise. You must understand how unbearable this process is. Without the necessary passage through catastrophe, one will remain doomed to the cliché.
Deleuze spends a lot of time on what Klee describes as a gray point that must be “leapt over.” I don’t know if I understand what he’s saying but what I do understand is the axis where black and white and the center of the color wheel meet (the combination of the complementary colors) is gray. The whole painting can end up as a muddy Failure. Catastrophe comes in there too. The way out is through color.
Of course, a painting is only color. It doesn’t necessarily help much but it is the only answer.
I’m not sure I have adequately described even the first session. There is a lot there.
It starts with Deleuze wondering if painting has anything to offer philosophy. And the lectures then form a kind of painting—he continuously circles the field: enlarging terms, adding ideas, strengthening outlines, leaving white spaces. It’s very similar to his description of the way Cezanne paints in what he calls “patches” and I call brushstrokes.
I’ll quote Deleuze’s final words: So there you have it!
—CNQ
*This is a description of the history of the idea of the diagram from a wonderful review by Lisa Taliano:
“The idea of the diagram was originally inspired by the American philosopher and logician Charles Pierce. For Pierce, diagrammatic thinking is a form of reasoning that puts sensitivity at the center of the process. It depends on feelings, intuitions, and imagination for its development, and involves what he calls musement—a way of letting the mind wander without rules or purpose. [1] This state of mind, Pierce believed, is at the root of all reason. Deleuze takes this idea of the diagram and develops it to encompass everything, connecting it to the production of nature/culture itself. The Diagram becomes linked to the “Abstract Machine,” a central concept in A Thousand Plateaus. The abstract machine deals with “fluxes, fluids, functions, it churns up matter, form, energy, networks.”[2]
Dona Nelson and Joanne Greenbaum
by Lisa Taliano, Tussle Magazine, Feb 2, 2026