To prove that it is not possible to draw and paint as the eye sees.
One of the first issues to confront anyone trying to draw what they are looking at is the conundrum of being a creature with two eyes, both of which operate as if they are at the centre of a sphere. As you can see from the drawing above, any vertical looked at by an observer is closer to the eyes at eye level and is further away from the eyes as it rises above or falls below eye level. This is exactly the same issue if you look to the right or left and is behind the classic drawing problem as was set for students on the foundation course at Leeds when I first began teaching.
The final drawings looked very like these drawings below and they reflected different levels of perceptual awareness.
A continuous experience of looking at a straight line
The line AB appears continuous, and as students measured distance, most of them decided that the point nearest to them would also be the point on their drawing that would be nearest the bottom edge of their drawing paper. The dashed line CD often actually existed as a drawn line on the floor, because a student could use chalk and string to produce a semi-circle with themselves at the centre, and which would therefore in effect if drawn, be drawn as a straight line. An interesting reversal that some students would find very hard to grasp.
A discontinuous experience of looking at a straight line
I wanted to go back to these experiences because I am very aware that another member of the perceptual drawing research team, Mike Croft, has referred to these issues in relation to his own research into how to record a growing awareness of a perceptual event. See this earlier post when Mike was operating as a guest blogger.
My particular interest in this is though political. As recent events have shown us, even given clear evidence to the contrary, if some people believe in a certain situation, they will continue to believe in that situation because if they were not to, it would destabilise their belief system. They literally cant see the situation in any other way. Perception is I would argue therefore tightly bound up with belief and the type of personality of the observer.
Belief systems it would appear to me, are also in operation when we begin to look at the way 3D visualisations are developed. In Matthew Kaplan and Elaine Cohen's paper 'Producing Models From Drawings of Curved Surfaces', they state the following, 'Few sketch based modelling systems allow the artist to draw
naturally. Typically, designers are forced to learn a set of
drawing operators that are used as an interface to an underlying CAD system. Alternatively, previous methods that
analyze existing drawings typically limit the type of drawings/models that can be reconstructed to a subset of models
useful in CAD. The goal of this research is to allow the artist
to draw as naturally as possible, placing minimal restrictions
on the structure and process of the input drawing and the
form of the output model.' (2006) The idea of what artists draw naturally, is reflected in the images we see at the end of the paper, it is presumed that artists draw in a very 'cliched' manner, that the old rules of perspective and consistent shading etc. are what artists are trying to work with. Drawing that questions perception, will it could be argued, very rarely be integrated into CGI visualisation systems. But there are some very interesting half way houses.
The Oakes twins have been working for several years making drawings using devices designed to reflect the problem of curvature and the idea of vision being something that originates from a spherical experience of visual perception.
The Oakes twins at work
At first sight it would appear as if the twins have 'cracked it'. Their curved devices allow them to look at the world and record it from locations clearly within a spherical context. However if you look at how their images are then reconstructed from the drawings produced within the individual strips of vision, you can see that they are in fact still using the idea of a continuous link between all the elements of the drawing, like those foundation students who produced a continuous curve, the oscillation of constant checking, that moves back and forth from inner to outer experiences is not taken into account. Their drawings are though really interesting and in particular their method of drawing as a series of radiating centres that overlap each other to develop a surface, is a very interesting response to the problem of the knitting together of experiences into coherent wholes.
The Oakes twins: Ocean Texture 2
The Oakes twins are quoted as saying; “Our eyes are only able to gather the light rays that happen to be aimed straight toward them. Collectively, any group of light rays that happen to converge onto one’s pupil are, altogether, fanned out radially from the pupil, with each light ray traveling perpendicular to the surface of an implied sphere. The surrounding objects of the world may be irregular and varied, but perceptually we live neatly at the centre of a sphere of incoming photons that carry information about the irregular surround to our eyes.” Because of this, the brothers create images on concave surfaces, which they state “is in harmony with the shape of light rays and makes more sense than a flat picture plane.”
A diagram of the theoretical situation set up by the Oakes twins
I'm not entirely convinced by this because it presumes the moment of perception can be located at a single static point, and this fixed point in my mind pulls the perceptual experience out of its ongoing process of renewal. However their approach does enrich the debate.
The Oakes twins exhibition view
It has been a useful experience to revisit and reflect upon perception and how it shapes our thinking. It is central to our ability to make images that have a relationship with the world and how we perceive it, and at one time this used to be central to most visual arts practices, including my own, but over the years I have like many other artists been more influenced by conceptual developments rather than perceptual investigation. This experience has been a welcome reminder that whatever I make as an artist it is going to be experienced by others as a perceptual phenomena and if I am not dealing with my awareness of this, I won't have control of the situation. We shall see where this new research takes me.
Foot-pain
References
Kaplan, M. and Cohen, E., 2006, September. Producing Models From Drawings of Curved Surfaces. In SBM (pp. 51-58).
See also
No comments:
Post a Comment