The aesthetic experience of the artist: Dialectic of the painter and their work

In order to shed some light on the relation that an artist develops with an accomplished artwork of his creation we initiated our study by collecting first-person descriptions of aesthetic experiences as effectively lived by several professional painters. Then we extracted from the descriptions a general structure of each experience and put it in line with the phenomenology of the aesthetic experience that Mikel Dufrenne started to develop in the 50’s. In particular we discuss the status of quasi-subject that the philosopher attributes to a piece of art when a subject perceives it aesthetically, and how such a status articulates in the elicited subjective experiences.