Before considering the following it would be helpful to have some background to draw upon for the argument below. We suggest that you read our essay, Rough Trade, in its entirety first, at the link we provide for roughtradeart.com, to get an idea of what we are about. Although, Rough Trade is primarily concerned with abstraction we find that the Hockney Dilemma applies to nearly every pictorial concern that we have for painting, as a general category. Given this fact, and because the short history of abstraction offers little to work with, we (once again) ask you to consider our developing thesis in terms of representational painting.

When we think of the contributions to world culture made in the Northern hemisphere, or as we like to say, in the Western world (and somehow forgetting the other half), we have many choices for our consideration that fall in every category imaginable. These categories include most of the genres and disciplines of the arts. We think of the sciences, as well, with their physical applications in terms of mechanical invention, or in the field of medicine. Our culture has developed unique instruments of commerce, and special categories of jurisprudence, and social interconnectivity.

 However, in terms of any list of these developments and accomplishments, one aspect of our historic contributions to culture is nearly always overlooked – the development of spatial painting. Whether, as Hockney's investigations seem to point out, that this form of painting was helped along by lens usage, or whether the non-lens using artists were foremost in its development, it is a fact nonetheless that spatially active painting was an exclusive development of Western art, if you will pardon this bit of Eurocentric pride.

 The Hockney Dilemma is partly about a perceptual condition that we entertain in the West, at least. This condition tells us that in order for a painted picture to be successful it must satisfy an intrinsic need we seem to have for psychic rest in visual terms when it comes to our pictorial choices in our ultra-busy, highly visually impacted society. This condition of perception tells us that a painting must be either flat appearing, or flat acting in terms of, for instance, its emotional content, in order for it to fulfill this need. As we have said elsewhere, Hockney's observations about lens usage in painting implicate the constant presence of lens-based media in our lives for creating this condition in us – or, in other terms, the delimiting presence of photography in our culture informs our pictorial, informational, emotional, and recreational requirements of painting.

 This state of affairs has been developing for a long while. One might ask, if this way of perceiving pictorial matters seems to fulfill some deep need, why seek to change the status quo? Rough Trade asks, instead, are our needs really being addressed by flattened out painting? We might add here, is flat painting itself, ironically one of the reasons for the loss of the importance of painting in our culture as a medium of choice in terms of fulfilling our pictorial needs? It seems that flat painting really falls flat in every way.

 In terms of the emotional, especially, we see that current painting (of every sort) has abrogated the spatial qualities that are available to it. For over 60 years abstract artists in particular have bent their pictorial resolution in favor of the flat because of theoretical concerns and dictums as opposed to any actual concerns of the viewer. We posit that this condition of abstract painting has infected the representational over this time, as well. It is clear that spatial painting has become lost to us as anything worth doing because of opinion rather than a movement within human consciousness. This has been a modernist trend, after all, throughout the last century at least, in all forms of visual art. In fact, as we suggest, modern painting itself has helped along this dysfunctional aspect of our pictorial acuity.

Rough Trade suggests that we have to take back into the tool box of painting the skills for evincing spatial qualities in a picture because we see that flat, photographically aligned, painting does not emote. Without this ingredient the desired psychic rest we hope for in a painting will never be achieved. All is not lost, however. As advocates for finding anew the means for spatial painting we suggest that a viewer may find in a spatial painting, either abstract or representational, over time spent living with it on their own terms, energies that will lend a sense of internal support that is not only psychically restful but, emotionally motivating, as well.

The viewer, through their involvement in a spatial painting, in terms of their investigations into its nature as understood, in part as inner depths and outward projection, will find exactly all of the qualities of life, of emotional movement, that we once expected from a painting. In functional terms this may be described as a deeply felt personal experience brought forth through the vagaries that are to be found in living with a spatial painting. One aspect of this might be understood as simply a recognition by a viewer that in passing by a spatial painting they seem to see, perhaps for a moment, only beyond its actual 2 dimensional surface into something that is interdimensional. Somehow we think that this is a given in representational painting these days. However, as Rough Trade shows in the essay of that title, this is not neccessarily a surety. This is definitely not the case for current abstraction either.

The question to ask now is how we might get over our desire to have a culture of painting where nothing is provided, and thinking all the while that the flat nature of current painting and our inability to penetrate its surfaces is somehow what we need in order to have the rest we seek. Perhaps it is a matter of terms? Is psychic rest really found in the denial found at the surface of the picture plane in a painting that presents as flat, or is it rather, found in the interstitial and projective areas within our perceptions of depth in a spatial painting? It seems that we must look back a bit in order to answer these things effectively. However, we do not suggest that we go back. It is just that development was arrested, so why not take up where we left things, at least in terms of technique?

For an example, we ask you to consider Rembrandt's painting, The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch, in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. To our eyes this is one of the greatest paintings that have come down to us from any era in terms of all of the positive concerns that we discuss here in the Hockney Dilemma and in the Rough Trade essay. Most likely, as David Hockney would have said in this case, Rembrandt was an eye-baller. However, whether his central figures (at least?) were rendered with the aid of a lens or not, the overall painting is alive with both projectional qualities and depths of interstitial poetics.

 The figures at the picture's center jut out at the viewer following the forward thrust of the Captain's hand as if it will come up under the viewer's chin. Yet, in a bit of contrapuntal play, Rembrandt gives us a second jab seen in the lieutenant's halberd pointing at our groins. Receding from these, back into the picture, our every attention is grasped by the many areas of light and dark, of crisp figuration and ambiguous line, pushing up and out of the visceral spatiality of the painting. We are caught in a whiffle motion that spins our eyeballs. The dark areas between the figures are alive with eddies of fluid dark paint that hold within their flows objects both easily discernable and ghost-like, as well: the tools and weapons of the guard, and the receding planes of their clothing, an unclaimed leg slanting away from behind the captain (?), and the errant dog-on-the-loose that looks to be hunting for a good hump like the dogs of Pieter Brueghel sparking at a kirkmesse. (As for that errant leg, it apparently belongs to a member of the company who is engaged in discharging his weapon. Anyone in the vicinity of the triumphal arch where the company passes will get an exciting show. And the rest of the town will be in no doubt of the companies' progress.)

At the painting's center-right (at our left), brilliantly achieving even more presence than every other thing, a girl in a spot of light sweeps out to us from deep within the picture plane forming the third prong of what has become a trident. She is self-effulgent, and she is Rembrandt's way of showing us that projection is a lot of what painting should be about and that there is more than one trick for getting it. The particulars of what she is doing do not matter to us. Surely she is chasing that little dog. What catches us first is that she somehow projects even more than Captain Cocq and his lieutenant, not in any strict sense, as in the projectional illusion found in the solid facts of the foreshortening of the captain's hand, but rather, because she is such an anomaly in the darkness, floating as she seems to be, incongruously, back within this crowd of hearty men. What we realize later, to our amazement, is that she is a moveable point.

 The girl shoots to the fore and grasps us because she portends on our emotions, this unexpected patch of laughter, this wraith of goodness. Much has been made of her in the past in art literature. We wonder, if the painting could be lived with day by day, how exposure to her presence might affect us as we revisit her there over time. What are we to make of the sense that we have that she may be able to move at will within the many visual alleyways in this painting and yet suffer no loss of her projective power? We ask, given our feelings about her on many levels, might her presence in our lives as we contemplate her ethereal qualities, lend us something like a sense of spirituality understood in terms of finding light, or lightness of being, in the darkest places?

Only spatial painting can give us these sorts of experiences. Photography will never do any of this for us as all that is available to us there is the subjective visual evidence that the photograph conveys as an informational tool. Yes, perhaps we may relate to what is there emotionally. Perhaps there are issues of context available to us there, as well. But these are add-ins that tend to give us no more than surface understandings. However, spatial painting is able to lead us further than all of this; spatial painting sets up actionable contextual conditions, areas of content and pictorial actualities, that serve to create new levels of meaning in conjunction with a viewers evolving understanding of their own internal status and how they apply this to what they see in a painting over time.