The Clarno Palisades and Ranger Station, John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, oil on board, 12 x 16 , May 2008
The Clarno Palisades and Ranger Station, digital photo, May 2008
I am having trouble finding time (and intellect) to discuss the particular mental discussion I have been engaged in over the last couple of weeks. However, if you check out to position of the little building (the ranger station) in the photo above, and compare it to the painting, you may see something of the perceptual question I’m pursuing.
Of course, I’m not pursuing these perceptual quandaries all on my own. Rackstraw Downes, a contemporary urban landscape painter from the UK who graduated from Yale alongside Philip Pearlstein, Chuck Close and others, has taken up the query and worked out various ideas about what we empirically perceive. Downes’ art and his intellect play with his empirical knowledge of linear perspectives, versus what we’ve been taught we perceive. He maintains that our book learning on perspective is based on architectural renderings (as well as the studies we know from the Renaissance). But empirically, he says, what we actually see of the world of apparent verticals and horizontals is very different.
Rackstraw Downes, Atlantic Avenue At The Entrance To The Van Wyck Expressway, 2007, Betty Cuningham Gallery (click image to enlarge)
Downes paints, in Robert Storr’s words, “the surface of the earth and what rises from or cuts into it….Virtually all of Downes’s paintings are horizontal. The vast majority are strikingly elongated.” (from Rackstraw Downes, Sanford Schwartz, Robert Storr and Rackstraw Downes, Princeton Univ. Press, 2005, p.61)
By and large, Downes’s paintings are very long and narrow — typically one might be 12″ x 40 inches or 18 inches by 94.5 inches. He also paints wide horizons on panels that are exhibited next to one another. So he’s a master at seeing what happens when the artist is planted in a specific spot, painting, and turning her head to either side to pull in the wide horizontal view. “As I turned to my left, without moving my feet, the verticals began to tilt: the more I moved the steeper they tilted…. The positions and movements of the body as the the artists looks and works are factors that are implicated in the way space is perceived and depicted.”
Downes is, as he says, an empiricist, and when he began painting representationally (he started out as an abstract painter) he tried to paint what he actually saw. And what he saw was that a wide horizon, say 100 degrees, will appear to tilt inward in the foreground and downward and back as the ground moves further back. Looking upward at structures that are at the corners of our vision will make those structures also appear to tilt inward.
These “tilts” are not generally accounted for by classical theories of linear perspective (the monocular converging railroad tracks) but they are what someone like David Hockney confronts when he photographs as horizontal scene from a variety of viewpoints. Things don’t look “right” in his photos, but we are hard put to comprehend quite why.
David Hockney, Pearblossom Highway, Photomontage, 1986
Rackstraw Downes,Water-Flow Monitoring Installations on the Rio Grande near Presidio, TX 2002-2003 (5 parts. Part 1: Facing South, The Gauge Shelter, 1.30pm)
The painting I did last weekend is a case in point. In the painting, I used a vertical viewpoint and, taking artistic license, pulled the ranger station close to the rock base so it would fit on the board that I was using. But the photo, taken at the widest angle my digital camera lens provides, shows something of the skew that a painter might perceive if the support were much longer and could encompass both the ranger station and the palisades.
The skew is one that anyone who photographs structures will recognize as being a result of the camera lens at a wide angle — fish eye views are the extreme of this. In the photo, the building tilts inward; empirically speaking, in our single-position eyeball-view as well as in a camera’s lens, foregrounds curve in as they are seen on left and right (Rackstraw Downes, p 129); then they move out and down as the scene moves to the middle ground.
I was unaware of the photo-eye view of this scene until I finished the painting and off-loaded my images. But I automatically corrected for it in my much narrower “view” of the landscape.
A good article and interview by David Cohen with Downes can be found on Artcritical. The book called Rackstraw Downes, cited above, with essays by Sanford, Storr, and Downes, has marvelous photos of Downes work as well as interesting classical examples to bolster his theoretical stance.
These perceptual conundrums raise interesting questions; does the horizon appear to curve in various directions because of the spherical nature of the eyeball? And where does the curve begin and how should it be attended to in painting? And what about photography — should the parallax (is that the word?) be corrected for by the photographer? Interesting questions.
June:
As I wag my finger I say;”But there are no “shoulds” in art.” The artist tilts according to his leanings.
I was surprised to learn that the eyeball is defined as an extension of the brain. Why this is not also the case for the ear I do not know. The light that hits the retina is a mess, the product of a bad lens set in a less-than-spherical ball, and the brain applies its own sophisticated mechanisms to create the straight lines and clarity of image that we experience.
But now that you mentioned it, the door edge to my immediate left does seem to be leaning backwards
Jay,
About the ear — it is also an extension of (or warped by) the intellectual units of the brain. Remember how the Rites of Spring caused riots (of horror and dismay) in Paris the first time it was publicly performed. A year later, it was perceived as a masterpiece of construction and invention. The brains of music listeners adjusted.
However, I think you are right that the eye is more fraught with ways to be influenced by what we are taught. And that door edge of yours that slopes — well take a gander at “The Artist’s Son” (c. 1885) by Cezanne. His corner also slopes and I doubt it’s about the sinking of the building.
I got interested in this because I had learned that important perspective concept was that verticals are always perfectly aligned with the edges of the canvas. But when I painted, I found I had to refute what I was seeing in order to adhere to that kind of geometric standard. I was mightily relieved to hear that it wasn’t just _my_ cockeyed vision that was interfering with correct perception; it was the cockeyed way ma nature made vision!
June,
This is a topic that I have been struggling with since I took up photography, about a year ago now. My photographs from the Lake Michigan seashore have such different feeling than a sketch that I made of the same scene.
I am grateful that you introduced us to Rackshaw Downes. I will study his work.
As an aside,I also love a picture by Pierre Etienne ThéodoreRousseau:The Village of Becquigny 1857-1864, in the link that you gave us. The road is almost in the middle of the picture, instead of discreetly placed with respect to some ‘third’ of whatever it is called, that photographers recommend.
Only a short greetings from an internet café in my German hometown, fatigued after an all night flight.
I need to test this out more carefully, but I’m not sure your description of this perceptual effect quite matches my own impressions. If I attend to it, I do become more aware of convergence of vertical or horizontal parallel lines with distance. For example, before a large window or a building facade, which we tend to automatically think of (i.e. “see,” and then draw or paint) as rectangular. But the convergence makes it into a fat rectangle, bulging at the sides.
I think we’re dealing with the same problem cartographers have in representing part of the Earth on a flat map. The Earth’s surface is spherical, like our perceptual field around a point (our eyes–I’m ignoring their slight separation). To represent it on a sheet of paper entails a choice of projection. It’s not exactly a distortion in that it does represent what we see from a specific viewpoint and viewing direction (imagine holding the sheet of paper out and drawing lines where light rays from lines in the scene to our eye intercept the paper). But parts of it do look different from what they would if we viewed them more straight-on, i.e. turned our head (while also turning the paper to keep it perpendicular to our line of sight). Hmm, not sure I described this very clearly…
Birgit,
I have liked Downes work for a long time, but hadn’t read any theory by or about him until recently. I was most appreciative of his written description of what brought him to his theory because I’ve always had trouble with linear perspective.
Hockney first enlightened me with his writings about classic monocular static perspective and how we can’t see a classic photographic/architectural perspective unless we close one eye and fix our heads in a vise.
Downes upgrades that information for me and really brings me closer to understanding what I’m faced with. Once understanding is available, it’s easier to make choices.
I’m glad you found this interesting; let us know if you have further thoughts (after you’ve recovered from jet lag, of course).
Steve,
I definitely agree with you about “choice.” And if I’m understanding your experiment with your piece of paper description correctly, I agree there, also. There are more views than one that can be asserted as “correct.”
Classic perspective is monocular — remember the famous drawing of the artist with his head in a vise, figuring out foreshortening, etc.
That perspective was reinforced with the advent of the camera, which is single lensed, and even though the camera view curves at the edges when it is working at a wide angle view, we’ve all been taught that that’s an “error.” According to Downes, Ansel Adams specifically addresses this in “Making a Photograph” and tells how to correct for it by “use of a swing back.” Downes says, “BUt why does Adams call this entirely normal and natural phenomenon a distortion? Though this is not how the building really is, it is how it really looks.”
There’s nothing wrong with the corrected view of views — they are important for architectural drawings, for example. But they are merely a useful convention, not what we generally perceive in actuality. Downes calls this an “empirical” view, which may be an overstatement, since empiricism might also demand correction for science/measurement sake. But I understand what he means — which is that the evidence of our eyes report various kinds of curved space.
Another Downes quote: ” I don’t find that I see systematically. I –we– have erratic, not to say subjective, reactions to size and scale; we do all kinds of things when looking: we shift our attention, turn and tilt, quickly or slowly, get interested in some parts and uninterested in others. The process of looking — especially the process of looking while making a drawing or a a painting — is far too alive and spasmodic to be rationalized.”
By the way, Downes does a kind of experiment similar to yours: “I held up a long-handled brush at arm’s length to establish a true horizontal…, and I tested the apparent tilting against this.”
I think that just as Cezanne taught us that tilting the table up to see all its objects could provide a fresh and interesting take on the still life mode, Downes is insisting that painting what one actually sees as opposed to what one ought to see might be refreshing.
I was able to get the Rackstraw Downes book at the library and have enjoyed the looking I’ve done so far. One thing I find very appealing is his predilection for non-traditional landscapes (like you, too, June), for example underpasses or excavations or vacant interior spaces in the city, and roadsides, ditches and the like in the country. The perspective distortions are not systematic; if they were, there would be consistency across the picture plane. But there are a number where the tilt angle of the verticals varies irregularly in different structures, as if each is painted from a different point and angle of view, a sort of mild cubist effect.
One thing that I notice that is happening in the Rackstraw Downes paintings is the use of the vertical(line/object) in the (more or less)middle of the composition, an indicator for the point of view/focus of the artist´s eye;the same thing in david hockney´s composition which doesn´t happen in June´s painting; (this isn´t a criticismas I really like your work) but just to point out that one thing that might be bothering you June, about your compositions, in general is this lack of attention to the vertical refernce point.
We feel a vertiginous lack of stability in any photo or painting that has no mooroings to a cretain tradition or an accepted convention of ¨reality¨, verticals are vertical, and horizontals are horizontal. One can be ¨off¨ but when both are off if it gives a strabge sense of reality/vertigo etc…
*strange
Thanks, Lynne, for your observations. I will check through other Rackstraw Downes’ images to see if he always uses a reference point in that way.
I don’t think this is an issue in my own painting — it doesn’t work very strenuously with the Downes’ “empirical” observations because it doesn’t push the horizon out much. The photo does, of course, but it’s just for reference.
I sense that Downes would say that the convention is what distorts reality and that the sense of vertigo one might feel when faced with his work is really only a cultural by-product of having our “true” senses distorted by photography and Renaissance ideas of perspective. I’m just speculating, of course.
It seems indeed that Downes almost always includes strong “verticals,” mostly of buildings, in his cityscapes. Not rarely it’s an actual pole not too far from the center.
One thing he says in an essay in the book I found especially interesting:
yes I agree absolutely. And what we personally find interesting in a subject, whether landscape or whatever, what we focus on, is our personal ¨take ¨ on the subject, and then of course there are the wonderful magic things that happen , the rocks to the side In June´s painting, become more compelling, and therefore are larger than in ¨real¨ life, and hence more compelling , create an emotional effect (of some sort) whether completely consciously or not, but that´s the magic quality of making art too.
An easy-to-see example of the bulging I was trying to describe (comment 4) is in today’s NY Times. Pop up the larger checkerboard image and put your nose close to the screen. But it’s not very great if your head is still–it gets huge as you are moving towards the screen. Fascinating article.
Steve — Thanks tons for the reference. I checked out the first image example and noted that it took me a tad of time to see the bulge. So my brain is compensating for its compensation, perhaps?
It’s evidence indeed of why visual art is eternally fascinating and changeable. “Representative” art only represents a tiny fraction of the possibilities inherent in any given scene that might be encountered.