While chatting to Ivan, the president, recently the subject naturally turned to art, and he suggested that perhaps my more lucid thoughts could be committed to the News Letter. It is an acknowledged fact that art and the discussion about art are inextricably linked. From Constables statement that painting is a branch of natural philosophy (science) to whether or not Tracy Emin is an Artist.
Few if any can have begun the journey of art without considering the implications of the task before them. The simple act of drawing would be very difficult to explain to the preverbal Martian. How can a drawing made up of lines, which indicate where a person or object interfaces with the world, be used to represent the world of vision, a world that is seen by light and its inverse the lack of it. Or put more simply that which is represented by a black and white photograph.
So important are such implications that I suggest to anyone starting out on this journey that before brush touches canvas the philosophical aspects need to be considered. The primary one being that the objective must be established. Drawing an illustration of Corky the Cat is no substitute if what was hoped for was an accurate visual interpretation of an indiscriminate ball of fur lost in a patterned rug. Or is an illustration what was desired? i.e. a visual explanation, a sketch is perhaps another option. Or maybe a “picture” with its implication of a romanticised interpretation. Or do we want a painting? And here we eventually arrive at the question: What is painting?
So
difficult has this question been that it could be said to have taken 2,000 years
to reach the understanding we have today. Although this graph has its peaks and
troughs e.g. there are examples in Pompeii, well before the renaissance, which
would not look out of place in the Quattro cento. However in general if we go
back in time to see what visual interpretations were, before these questions
were answered. The first thing we discover is that the western art world has
gone down the road of translating the visual world as apposed to say the Chinese
or Japanese approach, typified by work such as the wave by Hokousa. This is much
less to do with vision, and more to do with a symbolic representation of the
process which translates the patches of light we see and decides we are seeing
the phenomenon known as a wave. This knowledge puts us at a serious disadvantage
when we attempt to translate the 3D world into2D.One
attempt to counter this will be familiar to the reader. The technique of
teaching someone to copy a picture more accurately by turning it upside down,
the aim of course being to eliminate the perception and rely on vision.
However, this is of no use when painting from life, the perception difficulty
is always going to be an enduring problem. We can see with the exception of the
spikes on the graph, the further back we go with respect to time, the more
primitive these works of art become. There has been a recent foray into this
area by Dr. Nigel Spivey an Oxford art historian, who has written a book and
produced a T.V. programme (How art made the world. BBC 2) and although I am sure
I could be accused of over simplification here, his main plank is along the
lines of, these primitive works are distorted deliberately because humans like
distortions. As the reader will discover this shows a gross misunderstanding of
the process of translating the visual world. To gain a deeper insight into this
area we can examine another “expert” adding confusion here, Gombrich in his
book ‘Art and Illusion’ asks the question “a problem which has haunted the
minds of art historians for many generations..........will the paintings we
accept as true to life look as unconvincing to future generations as Egyptian
paintings looked to us?” What Gombrich fails to understand here, and it
seems fellow art historians, is that the Egyptians were illustrating perception,
again much in the Hokousa wave type of approach. This progression is not the one
Gombrich suggests, where painting just improves with time, this is the
pre-disentangling of vision from perception. This is the equivalent of the
Highway Code symbol of a car falling off the edge of a quay, no one has ever
slammed on their brakes and then
said “gosh that’s an awful drawing of a car!” The symbol conveys
the information needed. Similarly an Egyptian opening a door and seeing a
stylized Egyptian painting of a figure, never said “phew, that gave me quite a
turn, I thought that was a real person for a second.” The Egyptians would not
have seen these works in any other way then we see them today. This is before
the Western world decided to go down the road of translating the visual world,
an important distinction. It would help if the people who populate the arts
service industry knew what they were talking about or were at least not the
visual equivalent of the tone deaf, if you think I am being harsh on these
people it is worth remembering that they can have a devastating effect,
controlling as they do, what is seen as art. It would hardly seem a wise move
to have commentators on art from this stable i.e. like these or taught by the
likes of these, and yet at every turn the art world is dogged by these, the
uninformed, or worse still the badly informed, thinking that they can offer a
worthwhile contribution to art. Where as their contributions, are more often
than not, a force for the worst, misdirecting the art world. This has become so
apparent that, one from their own ranks, Mathew Collins, has attempted to
redress one of their solecisms, in a book and TV series, that being the idea
that the story line is the important factor, which makes a painting into a work
of art. His book and T.V series were epitomized in an interview, where the
interviewer said he had always wondered what aspect of a painting (Titian’s:
Bacchus and Ariadne) gave it its enormous value of several million pounds, to
which Matthew Collins replied, “not the story line, Bacchus and Ariadne are not
that interesting”. We can see the danger of this art historian speak which he
was trying to dispel, for if the story line is the important aspect, so much
easier for wavy lines, because they produce an optical illusion, to be
considered as art.
To be generous to the arts service industry, the fact that this article is being written is testament to the difficulty of this area. As an example of this, an acquaintance of mine, of some years, confided in me that she had no idea what made a painting good or bad. But this person is not someone who has no connection with the art world, on the contrary, she has spent her entire life, minus a few years for childhood, of 43 years, in the art world, from A level at school, a degree in art, earning her living as a general commercial artist and now as a set designer, if nothing else this confirms that we are dealing with a rather esoteric area.
Our first step on the artistic ladder mirrors the history of art i.e. confronting the difference between vision and perception.
Anyone who has had even the slightest brush with art tuition, will have been surprised at their own shoe being too large to fit onto their forearm, or the image of their shoe resting vertically on their shoulder being taller than their head and neck combined.
These revelations are a shock because the uninformed drawing of a human figure represents more, what are known as a medical homunculus and is in fact its own form of psychological homunculus. Where areas we consider more psychologically important are represented by an increase in size, giving us the familiar childish drawing of large head with a face taking up more than the statutory half of this head, enormous eyes, tiny feet, etc. etc. This is the Hokousa wave approach, i.e. the visual representation of perception. Excluding the spikes on the graph, it was somewhere around the 13th century when the western world diverged from other civilizations and the struggle to separate vision from perception began in earnest. Great strides where made in this respect with anatomy, Pero della Francesco geometric mapping, Durer’s mapping with cords, Alberti’s perspective i.e. drawing on a window, with its inherent problems; ignoring as it does lateral perspective, which was succinctly identified by Leonardo with this ingenious plan diagram.
And let this plane be d e on which are seen 3 equal circles, which are beyond this plane d e, that is the circles a b c. Now you see that the eye h sees on the vertical plane the sections of the images, largest of those that are farthest and smallest of the nearest.
Indicating that as the visual cones from the outside columns are cut diagonally, the diameter of these columns on the window are greater than the column in the centre. With the phrase ‘largest of those that are farthest and smallest of the nearest’. It goes without saying Da Vinci experts notably Carlo Pedretti have written that this is a slip of the tongue, so to speak, totally misunderstanding the diagram, or that it is Melzi’s (Leonardo’s note taker) faulty note taking. Another giant leap in disentangling vision from perception was made by the Impressionists and the invention of the camera. It became apparent that objects were not seen as discreet entities as with the renaissance drawing and colouring in approach. But that the bottle would be lost and found as the artistic parlance would have it. The computer after the eyes then computes that these are two separate objects and that one is a bottle and one is a table, a different kettle of fish altogether. Also a machine without the physiological homunculus problems and with its crude resolution indicated that, for example, an eye is the same size as a finger nail, but more importantly does not warrant any more attention. The crude resolution of early photography indicated that the medium was an acceptable limiting factor with regard to resolution, producing that familiar impressionistic format, of paint being applied in dashes like rain with no concession to distance or detail, this established that important point that the subject is interpreted in a medium, in this case, of paint.
To try to ignore the medium, or to attempt to eradicate the evidence makes for an unpleasant effect, the reader will recall as a child drawing with a pencil and then smudging part of the drawing with a damp finger, with the aim of making some improvement perhaps by producing shading, but being horrified at the unpleasant results. This is because the medium is being abused; pencil, it has suddenly been discovered never looks better than when it is making lines. I would suggest that on the whole it is better to keep fingers out of all mediums, wet or dry, either paint or pastels, but it seems especially pastels, remember Chardin managed to avoid such pitfalls.
Lastly, the umbrella under which this all takes place; one the Taoist calligraphers took to its ultimate extreme, the concept that, as soon as brush touches canvas the mark which results says something about the author. I would happily go further down the Taoist philosophy road and say that everything we do is an extension of ourselves. Franz Kline was perhaps in the front line in exploiting this idea in Western art, with what may seem to be the literal embodiment of Taoist calligraphy in painting. But for some, not realizing the truth in this philosophy, has led to them shooting themselves in the foot. Jackson Pollock, one who would like to be seen as the uninhibited wild man of the art world, far from producing uninhibited paintings: no wild slashes of turquoise over brilliant orange splashes set off by acid yellow spots, these paintings were tight, muddy, drab offerings, as any child will tell you using all the colours in your paint box produces an over all effect of muddy brown. Often Pollock’s dripped paint formed a wrinkled skin, possibly the nastiest way to apply paint yet conceived, these works far from revealing a wild uninhibited artist expose a visually illiterate anal retentive.
It is important that the artist is a well-developed, well-rounded, intelligent, perceptive person. Work on those aspects just as much as the artistic ones. For when we look at a brilliant painting, although we may never voice these thoughts, as the Taoist philosophy would have it, it is a glimpse of the inner person we see in that study in paint.
It is clear that the past has laid a path, which informs the present, but it is usually our lot not to learn from history but to repeat it. And I dare say that most if not all painters have laid an almost identical path. Whether by learning from history or as the result of a journey, we can say without being proscriptive that the other stops on that journey have been surpassed and the objective is now to produce a study in paint.
Peter Eccleston.