Although we’ve all seen those visual illusions based on ambiguous figure and ground, I realized I’d only seen this discussed in terms of geometry and shape, never lightness (or tone). So I decided to haul out a few classic examples and see what your reactions are. If you want to be unbiased, examine the pictures before reading the text following.

Is there a difference in what you see first in the images below?

The vase/face illusion may not be the best example. At least for me, it switches fairly rapidly between the two possibilities. But does one dominate for you? Is it the same when light and dark are reversed?

The pair above is sometimes used to illustrate our different interpretations depending on brightness. Typically, the black square is perceived as something lying on or covering the gray surface, whereas the white square is seen as a window to something below or behind the gray. Tyler Green noted something related to this in a recent post about Picasso-Matisse mutual influence.

In the two Eschers below, do you notice the same animals and objects first? Can you tell which is original and which reversed?

In the art that you make or like, is there a predominance of one lightness relation of figure and ground? Do you think there’s a prevailing tendency in your daily perceptual world?

(P.S. The original Escher is second.)

The specifics: On Wednesday we painted at the Willamette River waterfront, in a piece of waste ground, just to one side of the Interstate 405 (Fremont) Bridge as it rises over the river. One humongous stanchion was no more than 10 feet from my painting spot. The roar of the traffic was absolutely constant; it was only maddening if you tried to talk to someone. The field was dusty but large, the sun quite warm, the wind constant, and although there were city amenities beyond us on all sides, a chain link fence and heavily trafficed road cut us off. It was a total enveloping environment, not necessarily unpleasant if you sank into it.

That was Wednesday. On Thursday and Friday, we moved the art school’s painting studio and worked on projects based on one of the plein air pieces. I chose to enlarge upon images and ideas that I gathered from the Under-the-Underpass experiences.

Fremont Bridge 1, photo, June 2008

Fremont Bridge 2, Photo, June 2008

Fremont Bridge 3, photo, June 2008

Below are the two on-site paintings that I produced, each in about 3 hours of work.

Fremont Stanchion, 12 x 16, oil on board

Fremont Bridge and Front Avenue, 12 x 16, oil on board

When we went back to the studio for the two days of further work I brought in a larger canvas — 18 x 36 inches — with different proportions than the on-site boards. I had taken a lot of photos of the bridge and surrounds, and so I collaged them into an approximation of the size of the new canvas. The photos were, of course, incongruous with one another — I wasn’t attempting a panorama when I photographed them. But I taped them together so that some of the bridge contours approximately matched. I also collaged structures of the same bridge scene on what would be the top and bottom of the “canvas”, so the complexity of the scene was doubled. (The representation below isn’t the same as I had worked up in the studio; I couldn’t recapitulate at home what I was working from there. But it may give you some idea of what I had in mind.)

Collage of Fremont, Photos

By 3:45 on Thursday, the first full studio day, I had produced this from the collage above:

Fremont Bridge, draft 1

It was clearly not what I wanted. My desire was to bring in the force and power of the structures, a sense of the noise, and its enveloping presence. Instead what I had was swoosh.

At that point, Jef, the instructor, intervened. With the back of the brush, he traced a couple of lines through the paint that he suggested would give me something of the impact that I had in the collage. With 15 minutes left in the class, I took the biggest brush I had and reworked the canvas, like this:

Fremont Bridge, draft 2

The next morning, I faced the mass of confusion that I had left the day before. By the end of the workshop that day, I had advanced the painting to this point:

Fremont Bridge, draft 3

In two crucial areas, the instructor gave me advice that made the painting what it is. Relatively early on, he suggested inserting the telephone pole in the front center. And he showed me how to enlarge proportions and work over the perspective to give a sense of greater intensity, closeness, and distance.

His final suggestion, which I haven’t had a chance yet to act on, was to work the shadows and light irrationally, “incorrectly” a la Giorgio de Chirico.

Each of his suggestions was right on the mark. I doubt I could have carried off the painting without them. My conundrum now is how to see in such a way that I can make my own suggestions to myself and continue in this direction. I am reviewing my notes and my experience (this post on A&P is an important part of the process); are there other ways to imprint my memory and work with the specific knowledge I gained with this instructor?

One might assume it would be easy to capture huge numbers of images with, say, plenty of sky as negative space. To my surprise, I’ve found it rather difficult to come up with such views, if they’re to be more than forced snapshots. On the other hand, I have no objection to playing with images on a computer. So it occurred to me that I could accelerate building new intuitions about negative space by making my own. Whether or not nature can be improved upon, the ability to compare related images with certain differences is nicely complementary to seeking out diverse examples.

The above image is derived from the first one by removing two groups of foliage. I like the spare lightness of it and the suggestion of a conversation when there are two main elements.

In the next case, I lighten out almost half of the image to get a very asymmetrical composition.

I feel that I’ve gained some insight into the compositional possibilities and into my own predilections through just a quick bit of image play. Does it seem like cheating? I think of it as similar to the useful composition exercise McFawn suggested recently. At any rate, it’s no matter, that wasn’t the real test. Next is to go back out there, hopefully with eyes to find expressive pictures in their native surroundings, framing them to enhance their liveliness.

The idea has been to create a chain form, corresponding to a sequence of events; in this case questions and answers.

Scattered about my workplace are various takes on the letters “a” and “q”, done up in a number of fonts, sizes and materials. These have been strung together in attempts to find the right combination of variety, legibility and sparkle.

Early attempts emphasized strong interactions of color and form. They were entertaining, but the underlying call and response theme that I was after tended to get lost in the visual noise.

In this iteration I’m trying to standardize somewhat by choosing block letter forms and a monochrome finish. Last I counted there were three of each letter, which when tied together creates a tight mass.

The letters are all composed from the same size of stick, but some freedom was taken with scale and proportion, with one letter canted somewhat.

But now the questions: are there too few units? Is there too little variety? Is it too subtle or not subtle enough? Is the fact that it can be reconfigured a plus or a minus?

One thing I have noticed with this exercise is its sensitivity to lighting. Two images were photographed at night and have a certain deer-in-the-headlights effect. The other was taken in morning light for the sake of contrast. There’s a metaphor afoot here in the “media spotlight” that we encounter this presidential season. Pundits like to shine a beam on the backs and forths of this campaign - getting into the crannies, illuminating. I’m led to believe that the best lighting for a “q” and “a” chain might be a single harsh spot coming straight down.

This whole business is so darned programmatic in it’s Constructivist plan-your-work-and-work-your-plan manner, that it makes me want to mystify matters a little, like putting the whole thing in a shrink wrap bag. I can imagine viewers saying: “Look Henry, there’s a “q”!” and other words to that effect. Is this a dish that should announce its ingredients?

I’m not unhappy about the finish which is a mixture of varnish and sawdust that is then ironed flat, and in this case, hit with automotive primer. It points to the possible use of aluminum castings that would preserve the look of the sand molds with the option for portions ground flat and polished.

How many links do you think should be in the chain?

Showing the first version of this composite to a mentor, he questioned me about shadows.

Now, shadows are something that I had a blind spot for. In contrast, I have always been partial to reflections. At one time, I bought beaten up mirrors that I put into many corner of the house. I then photographed my small children, reflecting back and forth across the rooms and up the staircase. A few years later, I enjoyed the reflections in Richard Estes’ photorealism - objects reflecting in windows, mirrors, and shiny rims of steel stools in lunchonettes.

Inspecting the original picture with the boy, I realized that it needed to be rotated horizontally in my montage so that the shadows (copied now as well) point in the right direction. But there still is problem. The shadows extending from the feet are too short because in the original picture, the feet were standing on a pier. In my picture, the water is pretty close to the surface of the sand and therefore, I have to learn to paint extensions of the existing shadows.

To learn about shadows, I am now busy snapping them.

Experimenting with different properties of water - reflection and transparency - and adding shadow (the photographer). Tomorrow, I promised myself to remember bringing my polaroid filter.

I am puzzled why I liked reflections but rejected shadows.

Do prefer one over the other or are they equally interesting to you?

The thoughts were on Japanese aesthetics, and the abandoned series was a rather minimalistic one, captured in all of 15 minutes near the start of a Yellowstone outing during which I later busted my aging ski gear, cutting the trip short (I managed to limp out with frequent falls, discovering in the process that it’s not easy getting up from soft, deep snow when your skis are higher than you are).

I’ve long been attracted to Japanese aesthetic concepts, and I think I even grew up with the same book mentioned by Elatia Harris in her delightful essay (the cover looks very familiar and at least resembles one that was in the house). I think my own work is influenced by these concepts, in ways I’m slowly working out. What struck me most in the Harris essay was the idea of empty places in a composition, and I wanted to see if I could apply that in my current project Along Sourdough Trail.

But more on that in a future post. The images in the branch and shadow series shown here do not, in my mind, exemplify that compositional device, despite the large areas of nearly textureless snow. Rather, the train of thought was as follows: Starting from the thought of composition and considering some Japanese ink drawings in a book, I realized that empty space is much easier to achieve in that medium, where one can simply choose to put in only the desired elements. That’s much harder in photography (if one eschews image manipulation of that sort). I couldn’t find much blank space in my Sourdough Trail images, so I started scanning my entire photographic production, such as it is. I happened on the series here, and it immediately reminded me of the gnarled pines that often figure in Oriental pictures.

So I looked and fussed a bit, and realized I’d been doing it wrong before. I believe I was trying for darker shadows, which had the effect of giving too strong a texture to the sunlit snow, and was also hard to reconcile with branches that were more than black silhouettes. I decided to accept the lighter shadows, and found, this time, that I liked them like that. That was the key that opened the way.

At the end, I return to my hopes of explicitly trying out the compositional device of empty spaces. Have you ever been so taken with an idea or technique you just had to try it for yourself? Did it work out well? Did it evolve to become part of your personal style?

Looking back through the years, I do not remember when I started painting with oils and watercolors… maybe I was about 13. To be honest mostly of I know today has come from my own experiences of try and error.

To me, making a painting was never an issue but something that happens naturally with whatever materials come to my hands. Oils are my favorites, but recently I’ve been painting in a very quick method and found out that a mixture of acrylics, oils, glitter and others mediums work better for my new style.

In the past 3 years I decided to do a Fine Art degree as a nice “add on” to my previous qualifications. To my disappointment, I have learn nothing new but of a chaotic, hypocrite and delusional world from the Art teachers.

If you an artist with already some success and experience I recommend you to aim higher and not to go back to an educational institution. You see, despite your good intentions you setting yourself back and giving your own murder sentence to the chances of being ‘stepped on’ and muffled by the tutors, who also called themselves artists. You must have no previous artistic experience because no matter how you try to please and befriend this so called “artist teachers” you will always be seen as a threat rather than a student.

Unfortunately we live in a world that demands all this qualifications to be taken seriously. I have learned from my own mistakes, maybe because I was a bit naïve, full of dreams and hopes that a new qualification would push my career further, but realize that I brought this to myself to the point I had nothing but verbal abuse, bullying, harassment, intimidation and discrimination from lecturers. In the end I felt from as high I dreamed and have gain nothing but a new pretty BA words in my cv and an awful demoralizing experience I must rather forget!

More new painting in my redesigned website www.magicpaintings.com

Aside from the obvious reasons for the rejection (the quality of the work itself and splits of taste within the co-op group), I realized that I had gone to the interview unprepared for what I found.

The Co-op saw the interview as an application for an exhibit or a job; I saw it as an act of collegiality and a conversation.

Here’s a review of the process and my thinking about it.

I was told to bring some of my “most recent work” (which I interpreted as “most raw”), so I pulled out a pleine aire, a few days old.

Quiznos Subs, Prineville, Oregon

I thought I would talk about various directions my art tends to go, so I took in a couple of abstracts:

Growth

a “standard” landscape:

Steen’s Mountain

and 4 pieces from the series depicting the trashy scene on McLoughlin Boulevard:

McLoughin Boulevard, 5 AM

None of what I showed was framed; many of the pieces I would describe as still “in progress” — i.e. likely to be tweaked later.

Showing a variety of modes (landscape, urban-scape, abstract) was a mistake. And taking in paintings still in process was another mistake. Finally, without framing, the group couldn’t assess the work as it will appear in exhibit . All this I understood or was told by various members of the co-op, who reassured me that I really should try again next year. So that was OK. But a different question occurred to me:

Why would I have thought of this appearance as “show and tell” rather than a more formal application mode? Once I got over my disappointment, that was the question I pondered. For I know and fully accept to all the white-glove advice about showing only your best work, putting your best foot forward, etc. I squampfel about the strictures, but have been around long enough to have gotten over my rebellion at the strictures. So my error of judgment this time puzzled me.

I came to realize, however, that I was imagining the co-op group as colleagues, giving input on work-in-progress, rather than as curators or gallery owners. And that, in part, probably came out of my experiences in writing (both my own and through the experiences of family and friends who are writers). In writing, nothing is final until the book comes off the press. No group expects the “reading” to be a final product; no editor imagines that the manuscript, however clean, will be the final edited version.

The end processes of writing, it turns out, are far more collegial and communal than is the case with the visual arts. A writer expects, nay begs, for a copy editor to find the misplaced comma and the erratic spelling. But the visual artist would be devastated if someone came along with a brush and added a dot of Naples yellow to her field of daisies. Once a visual artist has declared her work finished, no one would dare to touch it. But when the writer sends off the work to her publisher, she expects to have revisions suggested or demanded, paragraphs deleted, sentences rearranged, and discussions ad infinitum about what more should be done. All that comes before the actual copy editing by the comma-splice person.

Some time ago, Jay made an off-handed “admiring” remark about my willingness to show work in progress. I thought it a strange thing to say, since the paradigm in my mind was of readings by authors of work-in-progress, not of applications to museum curators. I was thinking of Clement Greenberg, visiting the studios of the Ab Ex artists in the 50’s and turning canvases around that were facing the walls, saying, “no. No. No. Yes!.” But Jay’s training is as an academic, and so, perhaps, showing work in progress has long had a hint of the amateur, the outsider, about it — if the collective mind, the “audience” the students and professors, want to see only finished work, the raw stuff will seem naive or immature. There also may be an element of competition to this process, one that goes back at least as far as the Renaissance (Rubens and Rembrandt, for example) but which also may be fostered by academic hothouse of universities and art schools.

Groups like A&P, however, take an entirely different approach to the act of making art. Here, collegiality extends to allowing each other to play around with our images, photoshopping them to see what else could happen.

And, this emphasis on creativity, now part of most public school art training, is obvious when I’m painting outside. Invariably, when I’m outside, a child will come up and look and say, “nice job!” (This remark is sometimes comic in that I can be accosted when I’ve scarcely put a line of paint on the board.)

Adults tend to use slightly different but still encouraging language — “Looking good” “You’re almost there” — phrases which come from the amateur road races and jogging events that pervade the U.S. culture. These are charming encounters, and entirely different from the analogy of job applications, where the stone faced critic examines one’s color and form and shapes and paint handling and techniques and presentation as well as one’s age and rhetorical style — and then says, “We’ll call you.” Luckily, I don’t apply for jobs any more. Unluckily, I misunderstood some of the conventions of the visual arts.

Big Vase (work in progress, an abstract that was once turned another way)

Do you see differences in the way arts are judged? Music played by performers, for example, is supposed to be utterly polished before being presented to the public. But theater has its try-outs in Bridgeport before it goes to New York. Unfinished sculptures, like unfinished symphonies, are only “unfinished” in some technical sense of the word. “Reading from the manuscript” is totally acceptable; are there similar try-outs in dance, for example?

And, further, have you ever mis-understood the context in which you were presenting yourself because you had a perfectly good but misplaced analogy that you were using to prepare?

Michaela Frühwirth, Obstruction_1, detail

For me the loveliest find was the work of Michaela Frühwirth, reminiscent of the detailed drawings of Vija Celmins, though abstract in nature. If we relate it to the topic at hand, the picture here could be seen as a jumbled ice field or a micrograph of dislocation lines in an ice crystal. Other artists represent not only from the usual visual arts, but dance, music, jewelry design, writing, architecture, and even cooking.

With roughly 50 contributors, this collection is not surprisingly uneven. That goes for the editors, as well, who have done interesting things with an interesting concept, but also write things like:

So…
This book is a map
This book is not a map
This is a book about ice
This is not a book about ice
…

And they seem to have missed the whole point of broader thinking when they write in the introduction that “…ice is a substance that holds no fossils.” Yes, I know what they mean, but couldn’t they have thought in terms of of a million years of fossil air telling about our past climate, of ice cap troves of lunar and Martian meteorites, of frozen structural patterns that record the passages of a glacial river, as sinuous as any belly dancer?

Perhaps the thing I missed most was any substantive interactions or collaborations between scientists and artists. I believe the foundation sponsors meetings and exhibits where such discussions could take place. The book is apparently meant as an inspiration for such cross-pollination, but it would be nice to have some examples for those who can’t attend any events.

So do you have any good examples of art and science interacting? Mine is Bioglyphs:

(1) In the 19th century, Pierre Etienne Theodore Rousseau put a road lined by trees pretty much into the center of his painting ‘Village of Becquigny”.

Last week, Dave Caldwell published a picture of the Appalachian Trail in the NYT with a similar composition.

A photo by Seth Kugel, also last week in the NYT, makes the same point, vertical lines pretty much at the center of the scene!

Has Rousseau’s point of view - centered vertical lines - caught on 2 centuries later? What has happened to the convention of putting objects of interest discreetly at some ‘third’ aspect of the picture?

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.

But then I started wondering about the broader question of our willingness to settle for imperfect, incomplete, and often unsatisfying versions of works of art of all kinds: paintings, sculpture, music, theater, and yes, even photographs. Don’t we constantly tolerate inferior prints, recordings, performances, etc? Indeed, how could we live without them? How would we even learn enough to develop an interest in the originals?

I can understand an artist wanting to control encounters with their artwork, but isn’t contempt for inferior reproductions also a sort of contempt for the viewer or listener? Can’t we be trusted to realize that, say, a Rothko is a much greater accomplishment than it appears in that little jpeg on the web?

How far are you willing to descend in accepting low-quality versions of high-quality art?

Part of my motivation was to learn about blog design by working with my own Wordpress site. That’s been fun so far, and I may not be done yet. But I think it’s stable enough to present in public, and I welcome any comments you might have.

But my main question is whether you know of good examples of blogs devoted to specific projects. I enjoy reading quite a few blogs–must post on that sometime–but none have such a degree of focus. One can, in principle, achieve a similar effect by creating a blog category for the project and choosing to view only posts in that category, but that still doesn’t allow the freedom of a separate design for the project. True, such personal project blogs may often be password restricted or unlinked to, so there might be many I’d be interested in if I knew of them.

Here is a Bacon entitled Study from the human body

Contemporary artists also paint human anatomy. David Palmer paints human subjects engaged in movement. Jacob Collins paints human subjects more traditionally as stationary form.

A New York City dance group, the Ailey II dancers, enjoy popularity.

Body culture is rampant in the U.S. No longer just aimed at fitness, it advocates mindful movement. Amazon.com offers books such as

Is there a renewed interest in the HUMAN FORM? Will such painted human form express functional anatomy, mindful or any other kind of movement?

This is the image posterized. It’s alright but has lost the softness of the original.

This is watercolored and has the usual silk screened look. The view through the window has gone flat.

This is it now; time to declare the first post the winner - or perhaps the least loser.