59 PARALLELS BETWEEN LIVING AND PAINTING The Journal of Value Inquiry 37: 59–68, 2003. © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Parallels Between Living and Painting PEDRO ALEXIS TABENSKY Department of Philosophy, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa e-mail: ptabensky@postino.up.ac.za 1. Living and Painting Let us consider the fundamental distinction between having a rule and hav- ing a skill by drawing parallels between the practice or fine art of living and the fine art of painting. When someone has mastered the art of painting she does not come to possess a set of rules that she applies endlessly. She acquires a certain skill, a certain manner of approaching the canvas, which makes her capable of producing an indefinite number of distinct works. Every canvas is a new challenge which the appropriately skilled artist will know how to com- plete successfully. The person who has mastered the art of painting knows that, typically, prior to the act of painting itself there is no exhaustive plan which determines every detail of the completed successful work. Typically, the completed form of successful works of art, as opposed to some works produced by inexperienced novices, are determined not prior to their mak- ing, but in the making itself. To a great extent the act of painting is an act of balancing the different elements that make up a painting with the purpose of establishing a coherent whole that expresses certain very general standards of adequacy in a unique manner. But, typically, the whole is not fully deter- mined prior to a painting’s completion. How is a skilled artist able to integrate the distinct parts of a given work in progress? A skilled painter goes about producing a painting by adjusting the distinct elements that are already present at a given stage in the development of a painting. Every time a new element is introduced into a given work in progress, typically, a skilled artist will be able to fit the new element into the provisional whole and make the relevant adjustments within the system, such that the new element best coheres with the provisional totality, or best co- heres with her present expectations regarding the development of the work in progress. But, given that a skilled artist does not know the exact form that the end product of her work will have, she will never be certain that the man- ner in which a new element is introduced into her work in progress will be adequate. What a skilled artist is able to do instead is work with this indeter-