Durer
For hundreds of years the image above by Durer has represented an idea of the artist making objective drawings. At the core of the idea is the need to keep your eye steady, in this case by having an adjustable column with a pointed end that is fixed to the drawing table. This fixed point being essential if you are to be able to accurately trace what you can see. In the image above we also have a grid of I presume fine thread, which is stretched across the frame through which the artist looks at the world, a grid that is repeated by the artist drawing another one over the horizontal surface on which the artist draws. The artist then copies what is seen through the vertical grid of threads onto the horizontal gridded drawing surface, using the matching of these two grids as a guide. It is as if the observed image floats towards the grid of threads that crosses the frame and is trapped there, flattened so that the artist can peel it off and lie it flat on the table.
Durer's model reduced to a diagram
I have for many years been dissatisfied with this model and although I'm very aware that since the time of Cezanne, many artists have left this concept behind, it tends to be still influential because of its relationship to the camera.
The inverted image of the candle is captured by the photographic film instead of Durer's grid
In the image above, a camera obscura is converted into a camera by replacing its back wall with a photosensitive surface that will become a photograph after processing. It is the lens, or pinhole that both focuses the image onto this surface and inverts it, a situation that reflects the human eye's ability to focus an image in the same way. The diagram clearly shows that the inverted image still retains a 1 to 1 set of relationships between the object that is projected and the screen it is projected on to.
The relationship of points of a projected object to its projection using Durer's device
The relationship of points of a projected object to its inverted projection using an imaginary lens placed between the object and the screen
If Durer's apparatus was to be converted into a camera, a box would need to be built in front of the screen like so:
The woman this man is trying to look at is far too close to the tracing screen, so in order to put a camera body in place she has been pushed back to make room. The drawing being made by the man would of course now be upside down.
A camera in effect works by placing a lens that both focuses and inverts the image between the object and the screen it is projected onto. The eye of course works in a similar way.
The lens' ability to focus an image onto the back of the eye
One thing that is clearly apparent is the fact that the back of the eye is curved, and the image has to be curved to fit. The camera like the eye inverts the image, our brains re-inverting it for everyday use, the observer of a photograph is in effect turning it upside down to see it 'the right way up', but we rarely think of this because we usually only see the image after it has been processed. However going back to Durer's idea, we can see why at the time it seemed like a clear advance. There was little consistency to spatial representation and artists did what they needed to do to show what they wanted to show. In the image below surfaces are tilted in various ways so that we can see what is on them.
Both tabletops are visualised using what we now call cabinet projections
But Durer was working at a time when perspective was the new toy on the block and in comparison earlier projection ideas, such as cabinet projection, seemed simplistic. When using perspective, a cube much more obviously has a front and a back, its spatial position is clear.
A cabinet projection and a perspective projection
In the perspective projection the front of the cube remains the same, but the orthogonals converge toward a vanishing point instead of being parallel, so the back face of the cube appears smaller than the front. The interesting word is of course 'appears'. A cube's sides are always the same size, that is part of its definition. The cabinet projection is not so nailed down as the perspective and visually the front and back often flip between each other. As soon as you move into the world of the cabinet projection things become visually much more active and because of this I have found its ambiguous spaces much more conducive to being able to visualise certain aspects of the scan of looking than traditional perspectives.
You can of course add secondary information to try to pin one reading rather than another, in the drawings above a dotted line suggests less visual weight, so that the front face of the cube is seen first of all at the bottom left and then in the lower drawing at the top right.
The eye is usually accompanied by its twin, so every image is duplicated but from a slightly different viewpoint. It is also impossible to keep your head still and your eyes flicker from left to right and up and down constantly as they sweep for constantly changing information. Therefore the idea of a fixed image reflecting how we actually see becomes very suspect. A basic cube, is therefore much more likely to be perceived as a complex of layered bits of information, as represented by the drawing on the right below.
A Necker Cube (left) and layers of cube information (right)
The Cabinet projection of a cube is known within the discipline of visual psychology as a Necker Cube.* Psychologists are fascinated by the ambiguity of read, the either or situation that the brain projects onto the image. As I look at adding into the situation the shifting viewpoints and doubling of the eyes, this either or situation becomes even more complex and an interwoven space becomes more of a possibly. This is a space that is full of possibilities, points of reference are everywhere and these points are what for myself become a sort of visual battery. Out of the flux of looking will emerge an image, not so much trapped and fixed into place as in perspective, but something that oscillates into view, that vibrates into existence.
A representation of a reconstructed view of Durer's drawing
As you can see in the image above there are two eyes and these eyes are flickering over the scene that is being represented. The drawing below is of a plastic dinosaur observed during a walk through woods. It was drawn in a sketchbook with a dip-in pen. The time taken to make the drawing was about 7 or 8 minutes and I was crouching down to see the situation, so my drawing book's position was rested on a very wobbly supportive knee.
Pen and ink drawing made from observation
A representation of the tracking of looking made from the observational drawing above
I tried to re-trace the looking that had gone on when making the small drawing of the dinosaur, as I began to do so I realised that the image began to disappear back into the world that it emerged from. This was an interesting conclusion to a process of thinking about looking, what was a diagrammatic representation becoming an active, rather than a passive image, its final appearance perhaps being due to a ghost memory of a Daniel Libeskind drawing, a memory that had long ago lodged itself into my visual memory and which I'm often reminded of when trying to be more technical in my approach to making drawings.
Daniel Libeskind
Libeskind's drawings are like layers of architectural memories. They operate as if several transparent sheets of tracings were laid over each other and retraced as one image. By trying to recreate the eyes' activity when making a drawing, I realised I was also laying one memory over another. The tracking diagram in effect freezing recovered lost actions into a drawing space.
The final image from the observational tracking sequence
Gradually I found myself adding more and more layers to my own drawings, until they began to oscillate with their own energy fields, as in the image directly above.
My earlier posts on visualising energy flow are hopefully easier to understand if read in conjunction with this post. I had in one of them referred to the idea that once a drawing had been used to capture various visual and invisible energy flows, that it in effect stored the energies recorded like a battery. These energies could then be released and their charges perhaps harnessed to other uses. Could for instance this way of thinking about drawing be linked to how electroplating works? The diagram below is also a cabinet projection. For copper electroplating for instance, surfaces are hung in a copper ion solution, see. I'm trying to stretch my head around a possible metaphor about energy conversion here and the results will come out more in the objects I'm making. This is not about scientific logic, its some sort of material poetry.
A basic electro plating system
As I think around the issues connecting energy flow with drawing metaphors, I'm also thinking about the possible development of my more sculptural work into more process orientated directions. I'm also very aware that these approaches to aesthetic 'meaning' are about story telling and that it is the seductive power of the narrative that drives the work as much as the material languages uncovered. If I decide a drawing or any other artwork operates like a battery, then at some point I will begin telling a story designed to convince myself that this is a metaphor that works. This is a form of poetic activity and non of the decisions made are actually verifiable or measurable or academically valid. As a reminder to myself about this fact, not long ago I wrote a proposal for a journal article, entitled, 'Drawings as aesthetic transducers' based on some of the ideas that I have been thinking about in relation to energy flow and batteries. My feedback, on what was not accepted as a publishable article, was that I must make sure that my paper's claims are presented much more clearly as a hypothesis or as metaphorical expression. I should have clarified for the reader that the hypothesis is only valid as legitimate poetic inspiration for the act of drawing, and that I must not risk looking for any sort of scientific validity for the process." This was a useful reminder that these are just ideas, and as such don't have any academic validity. Even so I would argue that as ideas begin as poetry, and out of poetry new possibilities will often be released, that it was a worthwhile exercise. As an idea it could not stand up to scientific scrutiny but it is an idea nevertheless and one designed to change the way we might think about looking at a drawing. So how does this help you may ask? I suppose I'm suggesting that at times you will need you follow your own logic and that even when other people don't see it as being understandable, that doesn't mean you give it up or discard it. It may well take you somewhere others have never been and that is as far as I'm concerned validation in itself.
*The Necker cube is used in Robert J. Sawyer's 1998 science fiction novel 'Factoring Humanity'. In the novel the term "Necker" is used as a verb, meaning to switch thinking from one perspective or form of perception to another.
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