Improvisation in Painting

This chapter concerns the relevance of improvisation in regards to painting. Far from being obvious, this relevance is indeed doubtful. Painting, in fact, is ordinarily considered a typical case of a non-performing art, i.e., a kind of art in which spectators do not directly perceive the artist’s performance, but aesthetically enjoy the final product. In these arts – photography and cinema, literature and non-performative poetry, painting and sculpture, architecture and design, etc.1 – it is usually the case that process and product neither coincide nor happen simultaneously, and the aesthetic experience of the artistic achievement occurs once the performance has finished. We must then ask the following preliminary question, one that is both general and yet also intricate and intriguing: What role can improvisation play in arts in which the product of the performance, and not the performance itself, is the target, and the trigger, of the aesthetic experience?