How Concrete is the Perceived World?

I once spent a great deal of time drawing from life and from time to time reengage, practice, and hone the eye-mind-hand translation to paper, a connection that was important to learning to see and work with line, color and other relationships, but I had to move beyond, in a sense, away from, life to integrate the connection.

I do not look at objects or scenes while making work or imagine "finished" objects or scenes to relay.

The point of drawing and painting is not necessarily to create "illusion" of objects, devolving to simulation rather than according line, color, etc, each identity and function as spatial agents in the picture plane. There is no need for marks actively to denote or stand in for attributes of a physical object or set of objects.

"Every painter starts with elements - lines, colours, forms - which are essentially abstract in relation to the pictorial experience that can be created with them." - Bridget Riley on Paul Klee

In my view, line, color, etc., when accumulated, create a perceivable object/set of objects, as well as the physical object of the painting or drawing. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say a "line," or "color," etc. is capable of being or acting as an object, or being treated as an object, in relation to another "line" or "color." Labeling lines, color, etc objects is not what an "object" is to most of us -- physical, touchable. One cannot hold a line. Unless it is a physical line. Hence, I turn to a "material" line.

Update: A couple questions came to mind as did some initial consideration ...

• Are objects/elements servile to the rhetoric of the narrative or is the narrative servile to the objects/elements relaying it?
  

The "material" object is being used as a line/form. The fact that it is being used (acted upon or through) suggests servility in the making. So too the particle of graphite or blob of paint used as a line/form on canvas. What of the reception, though?

• Can the object or set of objects stand on its own and refer only to itself?
  

Each object is still an object itself, and when used as a material line/form, it refers beyond itself simultaneously as being itself. Compare the degree to which a painting on canvas can stand on its own and refer only to itself (without scale carrying it to the limits of an observer's range of view) - either itself as an object or its pictorial contents.