I know that some of the artists I am aware of like to use viewfinders to help them think about composition and selection. Some of them use these with a full and deep understanding of the implications of doing this, but others don't, so I thought I'd as normal ramble around the subject and see if I can pick out some issues that might help you decide to make use of them or not.
A typical bought viewfinder
The advantages of working with a viewfinder when making objective drawings is that you can use them to isolate your subject matter by limiting your field of vision and cutting away your need to scan and look at areas of visual information that could otherwise distract you. They also allow you to think about aspect ratio and how that might effect the compositional needs of your selection. All useful things, but they do come with certain implications. The first one of course is the impact of the rectangle itself. We don't see in rectangles but have become used to seeing compositions within them because cameras produce rectangular images and we look through a lot of rectangular windows, paper is cut into rectangles and our paintings are usually displayed in rectangular frames; but just because these things are familiar doesn't mean they are right or the only way to do things.
Looking within a rectangle also changes the way we see things. Our peripheral vision is cut off, our visual scanning processes are restricted and the situation we are looking at is made far less dynamic. We have in effect captured the view in a cage or trap.
However they can be useful, for instance the one shown above, the 'Artist’s View Catcher', is 3 1/2 inches square, with a window opening that you can adjust by using a sliding panel. Markings along the side help you set common aspect ratios linked to sizes such as 8 by 12 inches or 11 by 14 inches. The sliding panel has a small hole that you can use to judge local colour or tonal value and as the viewfinder is a neutral grey, this gives it more use value. I must admit it's much better than the ones I have used in the past made from 4 strips of paper and 4 paper clips, or old 35mm projector slide mounts but it will often cost you over £10. The cheapest I could find was Jacksons.
35mm slide mount
There are other viewfinders that also allow you to identify local colour, and make comparisons with set tonal values, such as the Guerrilla painter composition finder.
You match up the colour strip on the left with a local or 'seen' colour and do the same with the tonal value scale on the right. The Pixiss Grey Scale Value Finder below then takes things to extremes, you get three cards to hang round your neck. One a squared off viewfinder, another a colour wheel and the third a tonal value finder.
Pixiss Grey Scale Value Finder
If you want to make a small drawing so that you don't have to even think about transferring what you are seeing to a sheet of separate paper, the Tom Lynch 'Secret Composition Tool' allows you to draw directly over your gridded up view, so that you can see what you are picking out. I'm not sure how it really works and it seems overly complicated to me but you never know some people must find it useful.
The Tom Lynch 'Secret Composition Tool'
Jackson's viewfinder is a much easier compositional tool to use. You draw directly on it with a wipe away blue marker
Jackson's viewfinder
Artists have used viewfinders for hundreds of years and they are the basis of all image transfer techniques before photography and chemical image capture.
Van Gogh's viewfinder consisted of three wires stretched across a frame to intersect in the middle, as shown in the sketch below that he put in a letter to his brother Theo to show how he planned to use it out on the dunes.
Van Gogh
Van Gogh would copy the viewfinder grid lines onto his canvases, and they can be seen with the naked eye if you get a chance to look at an actual painting in the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, where if you search long enough you can sometimes see traces of his drawn grids between brush strokes. As he said in a letter to Theo;
"You will have seen in my last letter the drawing grid that I told you about. I’ve just got back from the blacksmith’s, who made iron tips to go on the stakes and corners for the grid itself. It has two long stakes, and you can attach the grid either vertically or horizontally with solid wooden pegs".
The viewfinder as Van Gogh drew it in his letter to Theo, 5th or 6th August 1882
The Gridvu viewable grid system is one of the latest and has the advantage of also having diagonal lines printed onto the viewing surface. This does make it easier to use when using a viewfinder to draw portraits.
The Gridvu
Looking at a face through the Gridvu
Of course the mobile phone has replaced a whole range of tools, we use it to record sounds, take photographs, communicate and more recently to be a drawing grid maker.
Drawing Grid Maker app
You have probably seen the Drawing Grid Maker app used on Portrait Artist of the Year, it is a grid drawing utility program which draws a grid on top of an image which you can then use to guide you when you want to translate the image onto a canvas or onto paper. It has a very simple 5 step to use set of processes. Load a picture from your device or web browser (press and hold picture to share with Drawing Grid Maker from web browser). Set number of rows and columns. Set colour of grid. Set line width. Save the image and print it out, or display it on your monitor/tablet/phone while you draw. (It also has diagonal line settings so you can use it like theGridvu).
Another related device sold to help artists is the perspective viewer. It is similar to the viewfinder as it is transparent, but it also comes with perspective lines already in place, so that you can link a gradually growing knowledge of perspective with what you can actually see out in the world.
Perspective viewer.
Landscape seen through a perspective viewer
Again I have all sorts of problems with these perspective viewers as we don't actually see in perspective. These are usually about 8 by 4 or 5 inches in size, allowing you to move between your images and your views. However I have also seen students use these very effectively, so perhaps my personal views on the matter don't really mean anything, the reality is, if it helps use it, especially if what you are trying to do is to unravel the complexities that surround how we look and how and why certain visual conventions such as perspective work.
Most people first come across the grid system in the art room as a device for copying pictures. This video is a typical school teaching aid.
How to copy a photograph
I still find it interesting to think about grids and so do other artists. Betty Tompkins made the drawing 'Fxxk Grid #20' in 2005.
Betty Tompkins: 'Fxxk Grid #20'
Tomkins' drawing tells us a lot about copying from photographs using a grid system. It is as an image very flat, the angle of pencil stroke has little variation because the information does not come from surfaces that change direction as they move over a three dimensional form, the tonal values sit in a very narrow range and texture is diminished because there is no direct experience of a textured surface from which to draw from. It is in fact a very 'dead' image. Although this is not Tomkins' main point, this is not the image is of a dead person, it comes from a series of images about how women are used in pornography, but the way it is made in effect 'deadens' or 'kills' the image and for myself, gives this image an added poignancy. The grid becomes a trap or cage and the very flat copying of a photograph signifies that the images of women for pornographic uses, are in effect 'flattening' or 'killing' them. The dead hand of the pornographer squeezing the life out of the image, the women 'trapped' in their situation.
Composition using rectangular frames is about selection. You can use 4 strips of paper to find new compositions within existing images, or to focus on one area with a view to changing it so that it pops out of the rest of the image. But selection can be done by making lots of small drawings from either existing work, photographs or reality.
Torn paper strips
Sometimes torn paper is a better solution, tiny drawings on awkward shapes can be a road to invention because you are forced to reconsider the frame as an organic rather than geometric form. You can of course make your viewfinder from a torn hole.
Torn hole viewfinder
Hundreds of years have elapsed since Durer made those images about drawings using frames and grids. At the time he was reporting on things he found on his journey to Italy, devices that he regarded as important new ideas as artists struggled to draw the world more and more accurately.
Durer
19th century Table de L'Aquarelliste (Watercolourist Table with sighting grid)
However these devices have now entered the lexicon of art itself and can become integral to the making of images.
Using a sighting glass: Ludovico Cigoli: 1610
Cigoli's image of an artist using a sighting glass could be a drawing for a performance, I like the fact that in this case the artist is the nude subject of the image, especially as it was made at a time when it was usually naked women that were subject to the male gaze. Cigoli was fascinated by drawing devices.
Cigoli : Two men operating an enlargement device; one man using an optical instrument, while the other draws a projection on a wall
On the other side of this drawing which is is the British Museum collection, is another drawing explaining how the enlargement device works. This fascination with optical capture continues and contemporary artists have returned to the subject many times.
Pia Linz
The artist Pia Linz has taken the idea of the drawing viewfinder and decided to build one that she can work inside. The small transparent room above is in effect a three-dimensional tracing frame. She sets these transparent acrylic objects up in places where she wants to draw and she marks her drawings onto the surface from the inside where she sits working. Afterwards the drawings are sharpened up and the objects exhibited as sculpture. The process now turning full circle, the capture device becoming far more important than the process of capturing the image.
Notes from a drawing conference (see notes on the work of Catherine Anyango, who was making drawn images of 'last seen' surveillance footage of people that were either found dead or went missing.
I have rarely touched on the nature of CGI and yet it is through computer generated imagery that the majority of people first encounter drawings, especially as so much of children's film production uses computer supported animation. Software to run 3D drawing programs such as Maya is becoming more and more available to artists and therefore, especially as I'm trying to look at certain aspects of perception in more detail, I thought it worthwhile adding my thoughts on what it means to experience images produced by this ever growing area of practice.
T figure: pen and ink on paper
I have no technical experience in this area of work, so the first thing I had to do when I wanted to explore the area, was to find someone who did, and Matt Clark of the Leeds Arts University animation department was the person I went to to give me an overview of what could be done. This was about five years ago and I'm sure he is now using totally different software but I'm presuming the process would be similar if I was to ask him again. I wanted to see if it was possible to create a 3D animated version of my own body and I was told that the first thing to do was to generate a T figure by hand and the drawing above was what I did at the time, pot belly included, as I attempted to be as 'realistic' as possible. Matt then took the drawings away (I think I did a back view as well but couldn't find that) and from it generated these wonderful flattened and opened out 3D grids for me, as well as the figures below it, one version without and a second one, at my insistence with genitals.
Initial figure without genitals
Redrawn with genitals
I found the process interesting and the resultant figure was very close in terms of its proportional visual relationship to my initial drawings but I was very distant in terms of any form of control over what was going on. I knew that the figure would be constructed using some sort of software like Blender, but what I was not prepared for was the degree of 'smoothing' that was going to be used to create a surface for the figure. I felt this was totally at odds with any form of intuitive feeling or emotional engagement I might have. In effect the surface seemed to distance me from the figure, even though I knew that it was based on myself and my measurements.
From a 'Blender' tutorial
As you can see from the 'Blender' tutorial above, a face has been constructed from a front and side view, just as in my initial experience, and the grid that has been pulled over the face to make a head has also been 'filled in' with a plastic effect, shiny surface. In effect for myself, this surface makes it feel as if the figure is made of plastic.
From a 'Blender' tutorial showing how to use 'pins' to position a 3D net over a 2D image
The next two images are from another 'Blender' tutorial, this time of two photographs, and it is part of the tutorial that shows someone how to use 'pins' to locate significant features, such as nose width, eyebrows, chin, forehead and mouth on a frontal view and link these to the same features on a side view. You can see the 'ghost' image of the pre-existing grid on the lower image as it is pulled over the photograph of the head, interesting to see how much movement there is between the grid and the actual face, the 'ghost grid' ear for instance will need to move left to coincide with the photographic ear, whilst the back of the head grid will need to be pulled to the right to coincide with the photograph.
I was aware that the reason Matt wanted a front and side view was that the co-ordinates for a 3D grid would need to be established. I was I thought very aware of 3D grids because I had used 3D software in the past, but I soon realised I was not as aware of what was going on as I thought. The first area of complete invisibility to myself was the use of NURBS (Non-uniform rational basis splines) or polygon modelling, both of which are used to create interactive surfaces for 3D modelling, each of which has benefits and difficulties according to how you want to go on to use the 3D model that has been created.
I have only recently begun to understand some of this and as always as I begin to get my head around things I tend to go off on tangents, so bare with me as I ramble around, because in order for me to make sense of something to myself, I have to get a feeling for the various entanglements that something has with the rest of this world. In this way I can see it more as a process rather than as a thing. I can also attempt to resolve the relationship between what I am feeling about something and what I am thinking about.
A recent project on perception finds me working alongside other members of a project team, including some who are working using computer generated imagery. Safa Tharib in particular has highlighted for me some aspects relating to the history of drawing in this area, and I'm hoping he will forgive me my re-rendering his Powerpoint in with my own words below. I'm trying to bridge that gap between a computer science understanding and my own very fine art, hand made understanding of these issues, i. e. attempting to answer my own self set questions as to how and why I might use computer aided drawing to make a series of images related to how the perception of our inner bodies can lead to the creation of images that can be both expressive of my own feelings about these things and be capable of communicating other people's thoughts and feelings about the same perceptions.
Before computers technical designs were drawn using rulers, compasses and protractors, but freeform curves such as ones used to visualise a ship's bow, had to be drawn using other means. In my day when I worked in a drawing office, we used what we called a 'Flexicurve' and in earlier times they used to use flexible strips of wood, called 'splines'. The Oxford English Dictionary finds the first recorded usage of the word 'spline' in the 18th century in East Anglia, England, and suggests the term spline may be related to splinter, something that can easily happen when you bend a thin strip of wood too far. As well as to help shape the curve of a ship's prow, spline devices have been used to design shapes for pianos, violins, and other wooden instruments, and the Wright brothers used one to shape the wings of their aircraft.
A flexicurve
A spline being made
Using 'ducks' to control a thin wooden strip's curvature
I have reflected on the use of aesthetically satisfying curves in earlier posts, so perhaps at this point it might be useful to go back and look at these issues, because they highlight the interrelationship between the physical, the mathematical and the conceptual, in particular when we look at the physical way that these splines are produced and how curves are anchored in vector drawing software packages. In AutoCAD for instance, a spline is defined as " a smooth curve that passes through or near a set of fit points, or that is defined by the vertices in a control frame." This reminds me of earlier posts on euler spirals and the Bézier Curve. Literally tangents that can be followed, but which are also concepts that entangle themselves with a wider set of concepts, including the spiralling of the winding thread as in clothoid spirals and the way human beings need to be subtlety visually controlled as they drive cars.
How to work with splines in AutoCad
There is something really satisfying about curves that are defined by constraints, and perhaps it is because we sense those underlying physical constraints that we feel a certain visual satisfaction when we encounter them.
Ducks
Splines were held in place at a number of predetermined points by weighted objects called ‘ducks’ and between the ducks the elasticity of the spine material caused the strip to take the curvature that minimised the energy of bending, thus creating the smoothest possible constrained shape of curvature, a curve that could furthermore be tweaked by moving the ducks.
Architects are of course also very interested in these issues, and it is in architectural theory that another series of associations is opened out, in this case an association with the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Andrew Benjaminan providing an unexpected link to a thread that gives myself an 'excuse' to draw images that reflect on that close relationship between inner feelings and external 'objective' reality.
Andrew Benjamin lecture
In this lecture we are reminded of Robin Evans' idea that meaning is the secondary effect of the operation of geometry (plans and elevations etc.) in relation to architecture, and this idea I believe Safa suggests, could be opened out to include thoughts on how the operation of geometry in complex 3D visualisation programs in CGI software creates meaning. Andrew Benjamin in the lecture brings in the idea that drawn lines that operate as boundaries (such as on a map) are in effect 'porous', i. e. they connect both sides as well as separate them. (Unless he states, they are defining a closed shape; in which case he argues the form is read only from the side within the shape. This is an architectural theorist remember, so does a 3D modeller only read these sorts of images from the 'outside' of a shape? I would suggest not, and in my experience I was happy to switch between looking at the outside as a surface and exploring the inside as if it was a cave) He uses the example of Freud's freehand drawn diagram of the unconscious to illustrate his theory that meaning is the after effect of an operation or an event. Drawings in this case being events and in my own way of thinking, events are what make up processes that are themselves entangled into other processes. This does ask questions as to the status of a drawn image in relation to what is portrayed or presented. A diagrammatic representation, is different to a map which is different to a sketch. Benjamin asks us to think about the 'potentiality of a line', arguing that it has both a topological function, as it divides one thing from another on a plane, as well as 'presenting' a proposal. He uses Malevich's term, 'the potentiality of the abstract' to point to a separation between the line's actual physical presence and how it presents as an idea.
In Freud's case he is looking for a language to describe a loss or change of energy, so he uses the metaphor of a wave and a wave becoming stilled. A change in modulation or frequency of an energy as it moves from one area to another is seen as what drives certain mental issues, such as melancholia. (Not that Freud really gets to grips with this idea in his diagram, but the idea of energy transfer is already helping me to think of my own recent drawings as places where energy transfer can take place between diagrams and representations) Benjamin highlights the idea of the divided self, a self that is part conscious and part unconscious, between which there is also constant movement, some things moving from conscious experience into the unconscious and some things moving from the unconscious into consciousness. We have no power over what is emerging from the unconscious, but we are able to control what emerges from conscious thought and it is in this divided but connected situation that Benjamin further argues that we need to be thinking about how a drawn line both presents a possibility and exists as a physical entity in its own right. We are once again looking at process here and indeed it could therefore be argued that what we think of as the self is really the after effect of a process. The drawing by Freud below being a static image of a dynamic process. It's lines create an order that moves around an almost Cartesian x and y axis; one thing being linked to another and this sequential system also means that we can read this drawing as a type of narrative, a type of narrative that is generative, i. e. that we can create further images that are reflections on the issues that Freud is mapping out in this and other drawings.
Freud's drawings
Looking at the drawings above, we can easily see the differences between an early freehand diagram and later technical drawings, used by Freud to illustrate his ideas. It is fascinating to see how a difference in construction effects our understanding. The freehand drawing suggests a mind roughing out an idea, it is a drawing that presents the development of a concept that is yet to be fully decided upon. Whilst the precise geometry of the later diagrams, produces a set of drawings that present a much firmer commitment and clarity of idea.
So what ties these things together? They are all concerned with ideas about our existence in a world that consists of both an external 'surface' reality and an inner underlying, often unconscious world of feeling and intuition. There are, I would argue, some basic elements that are needed to construct images, whether in a 3D computer programme these be NURBS or polygons, or in a human brain, where there resides image schemas, those small units of information that inform basic, automatic actions, and that create neuronal patterns, which are the abstractions that form the basis of our ability to undertake real-time actions. In relation to which, the cognitive psychologist Raymond Gibbs wrote: "Image schemas represent the essential glue that binds embodied experience, thought, and language", and I would argue that the elements that make up a net, (whether constructed as NURBS or polygons); those points and lines and planes, are the basic 'bits' that I use when I make a drawing and which I can only use because I have access to image schemas of my own, based upon the fact that I inhabit a particular type of body.
Going back to the spline, we have an idea of points of control, (consciousness) and the idea of effect (the various curves). If we look at the 'Blender' tutorial using pins to link front and side views, we can also in our minds hold two images, on the one hand it could be a NURBS defined net, of a spline being made and the ducks being points of control or if it is a polygon modelling programme, of squares and triangles being joined together at different angles. Both these images are revealed as a net, which is designed as if it is a sort of memory form of an average three dimensional face. This face is made more and more 'like' the 2D images over which it is plotted; the more pins or points put in place, the more the net can be pulled into a particular shape, and the less points are pinned the more the mesh of points, lines and shapes finds its own form. Going back to what Benjamin was talking about, the drawn line both presents a possibility and exists as a physical entity in its own right.
So what has this got to do with perception? I would argue that it is the idea of 'potentiality' or 'possibility' that binds together the moment of perception and an attempt to represent or image it. As argued previously, the body needs to react almost instantaneously to changing stimulus, both from inside and outside itself, if it is to react in a timely manner to external change. The construction of an animated figure and the establishing of a convincing external 'skin' or surface, is dependent on the construction of forms using a geometry that can control constantly reforming nets that both describe 3D surfaces and which can eventually become them. (As when 3D printed for example). However in order that the system doesn't get too complicated we tend to use attractors, or preferred patterns to create stability within complexity. NURBS which as I have recently found out are used to create interactive surfaces for 3D modelling, would appear to work in this way. Robin Evans' idea that meaning is the secondary effect of the operation of geometry, in this case in relation to computer generated imagery, suggests to myself that it is the net itself that creates meaning in relation to the forms it makes.
So how does it do this? First of all it would be useful to read an earlier post on cross contour drawing. In this post I suggest that this form of drawing can be a very powerful way of visualising mass and that it is also a way that touch can be visualised, i. e. that it is a synaesthetic mode of drawing capable of combining sight and touch in its realisation. This is why sculptors in particular like to use it, as it can carry information about the solidity of the experience of making things. A few years ago I made some cardboard models of fires. I took photographs from various positions and loaded them into 123DCatch, a 3D image making program that was at the time free and easy to use. (It has since been discontinued) I was interested in the image making potential of the software and wanted to explore the idea of making a solid something that was in constant movement. In effect to create a 'mountain' out of a gas, especially as I was working in one medium that had no substance beyond a mathematical code of zeros and ones and another that was seen as cheap packaging material and usually put out for recycling.
Virtual fires
Some images I left as they emerged and others I began to process, but in all cases I saw the distorted 3D grid as the main carrier of the message. The grid was in effect what I believed gave the images 'conviction'. Then a little later because of my growing interest in CGI I began my collaboration with Matt Clark and these moving images, based on drawings of myself, were produced.
I found it hard to associate with the images created, and unlike the fire images whereby I could see how the 3D grids gave a certain gravity to the forms, felt nothing beyond a certain humour in the way my surrogate body could be made to move. Matt making me laugh at what could be achieved, but like most jokes on extended play they tend to lose their potency.
Going back to the group research on perception, hopefully this rambling post can operate as an opening gambit, that begins to explain how I might be able to link with, interject or comment on the work of the other people in the group. It also hopefully serves to illustrate another issue, that of self reflection during the process of developing new bodies of work, something that those of you who are students, are constantly being asked to do.
Work in progress; stages in image development of perception of sexual arousal.
(The conjunction of diagram and representation)
References:
Robin Evans (2000) The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometrics MIT Press
Gibbs, R.W., (2005) The psychological status of image schemas. In From perception to meaning: Image schemas in cognitive linguistics, 29, pp.113-136. Mouton de Gruyter press
See also:
Qualia (Part one of a series of posts related to perception, of which this post is part two)
The grid as a cage or trap is something that I have long been fascinated by. A cage or trap can easily be read as a 3D drawing and a 2D grid can just as easily be read as a cage or trap. Look at these images of cages and traps below, they are already iconic forms, you don't need to do anything with them, as they have such a powerful image presence. Because of this many artists have made use of the associations grids have with cages and traps.
Above 3D cages and traps, below 2D perspective grids, they have a very clear visual relationship.
An early example of the perspective grid being used to define a space for humans
Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, the Victorian painter, depicted animals and people behind the bars of a cage several times. The image below is though of special interest as it plays with the flatness of the painting. An image that was probably itself gridded to transfer it to canvas, is seen through a totally flat grid, (the bars of the cage) and the only intimation of space outside of the frame are the few objects placed on the shelf like space right at the bottom of the image. The objects are squeezed into the space behind the grid, the lion on the right hardly has space to exist, by giving the observer a few spatial clues such as atmospheric perspective and shadow play, Landseer tries to construct a believable space, but the flat grid works against this and we are somewhat disturbed by the 'dispute' between what is depicted and the underlying technicalities of how the space is made.
Mr. Van Amburgh, as He Appeared with His Animals: Sir Edwin Landseer 1847
Francis Bacon used the cage format to suggest that his figures were trapped or caged in some sort of existential dilemma. The recent exhibition at the Tate Liverpool was titled 'Invisible Rooms' which is another way to think about what the perspective frame represents.
Francis Bacon
He must have been aware of historical precedents such as the way Durer used perspective frames and the grid to measure his figures, however it is also likely that Bacon had looked at the example of Giacometti, who used the grid of measurement as a way to frame his images. He also of course looked at Eadweard Muybridge, who used grids in the backgrounds of his photographs in order to establish a frame of reference.
Giacometti
Eadweard Muybridge
The perspective grid is often used in how to draw books to help students get an idea of how to set a body in space and when measuring by hand or with a plumb line you are in effect building an invisible perspective grid around the image as you try to measure what's there and how it is related to the space that it sits in.
Using a plumb line and horizontal straight in a how to draw manual
Bacon and Giacometti both used the idea of the frame to express something beyond the fact that it can be used to measure a spatial volume. The frame is as much a trap or a cage, and in occupying this dual position it is able to also express emotion and conceptual questioning.
A figure boxed in a how to draw book
Both Mona Hatoum and Louise Bourgeois have used the cage to express their feelings for the way that space or place can be both somewhere to live in and to be trapped by.
Louise Bourgeois
Mona Hatoum
The issues that underly the use of traps and nets were beautifully articulated in Alfred Gell's famous essay 'Vogel's Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps' which I have dealt with in detail in an earlier post.
As the grid becomes a trap, it traps not only the animal inside it, but also the mind of the trapper.
The grid is a powerful image and it runs through many areas of art practice. I shall no doubt return again to the subject, but if you want to read through some older posts there are links to them below and all refer to grids and how they can be used within drawing. The grid 1 The grid 2 The grid 3 The grid 4
