Edges and Edge Detection Part 3: The Funny Pages

Well, it's been a while since we talked about lines and edges. The first two posts are here and here. But the discussion was not yet complete. Let's turn now to an incredibly rich resource for consideration of line and edges: comic books.

There are a few reasons the comics are such a fantastic resource. The obvious reason is that they generally consist of line drawings. So a distinct typology of styles has emerged, within which individual variations provide further material for thought. The less-obvious reason is this: when you look at a single picture, you can look at it for a while, and then you go away and look at something else. Sure, you can stick around for a long time, but usually you won't - although my friend Shawn apparently once spent a couple days with his jaw on the floor in front of Las Meninas, a thoroughly understandable response:


But that's an unusual case. Generally, you don't spend that long looking at a painting or a single drawing. But when you read a comic book, you have to spend a longer time with the visual idiom of the artist who did the drawings. And that lets you test the effect of their visual idiom on your brain - is it satisfying? Does it annoy? Only when serious time and energy demands are made on your attention can these qualities of experience emerge. And in turn, analyzing these qualities of experience can help to tell you how you understand line and edge.

By my lights, there is a broad divide in comic book drawings, between consistent-line-weight artists and variable-line-weight artists. On the consistent-line-weight side of the room we have Dave Gibbons, who drew Watchmen:


We also have the mighty Jean-Giraud Moebius:


I'm sorry, I can't resist - here's some more Moebius. You can't eat just one...


And increasingly over the course of his career, we have Jaime Hernandez:

I could include others - Adrian Tomine, François Schuiten, Milo Manara - but as you know by now, I am nothing if not obsessed with brevity.

These artists do vary their line weight sometimes, but it is always a considered process, a conscious and willed alteration of their natural inclination to use an unvarying line weight throughout their work. It does not emerge organically, but as an outcome of choice. Contrast them with such artists as Jaime's brother Gilbert:

If you haven't read the Hernandez Brothers (Love and Rockets), I cannot recommend them highly enough, by the way. Here's a little more Gilbert:
As you can see, his line weight is fluid - it varies throughout his images, spontaneously and intuitively reflecting the emphasis he sees at any given time. The same is true of R. Crumb's drawing, although within a narrower range:


More Crumb:

(An aside - those of you familiar with Crumb will know that he always crowds the hell out of his compositions. I see this overgrown horror vacui as a variant of the graphomaniac impulse which claimed his brother Charles:
But enough about that.)

Beyond other artists, however, we have the interesting case of Frank Miller. Miller is a strong follower of the expressionistic line. Sometimes he goes so far with it that he approaches the woodcut:

Other times he remains tighter, although still using wide line-weight variation within a single image:
Here's another panel from the same epic comic, The Dark Knight Returns, so you can get more of an idea of what I mean:
Because Miller's line is so organic and emotional, you can also tell when he just does not give a damn - particularly in DK2, the rather catastrophic sequel which, I assume, he was argued into doing by means of dumpsters full of cash:


Again, in a single panel, it's tough to get the feeling of it, but if you read the whole comic, you form a powerful impression of not trying hard.

Now, we've established that there exist in the comics two broad veins of line aesthetics: the line of unvarying weight, and the line of varying weight.

This in itself is interesting. But as I mentioned before, a topic of real utility to the artist is studying the brain's response to sustained exposure to each type of line. For my part, I have the following experience:

I find it incredibly irritating to read a long stretch of Watchmen. The writing is very good, and on first glance, the art is just delightful - so crisp, so clean, so clear. When I first read it, I was struck by the counter-intuitive experience of being frustrated with its look after enjoying it so much at first. To a lesser extent, this is true of the other uniform-line-weight artists I have mentioned, particularly Moebius, the other purist apart from Gibbons. No matter what narrative topic these artists treat, there is something airless to their drawings after a while, something without vitality.

On the other hand, the most visually comfortable experience I have ever had reading a comic book was Dark Knight Returns. There is a wild variation in line weight throughout the book, and yet on the whole, it seems to poise within a nearly perfect balance of control and chaos, clarity and occlusion. No other book of Miller's comes close - he rarely shows the discipline to keep his line as controlled as he does in Dark Knight - check Sin City or DK2 or even Ronin.

However, this comfort that I describe distinctly fails to apply to the other expressionists I have mentioned here. I find it really, really difficult to look at Crumb for any length of time. I find it easier to look at Jaime's thin-line drawings than Gilbert's variable-line drawings over the course of a story.

What gives?

Here's my theory. My theory is this. When the brain reduces the world to perceived line, it gives lines variable weights over the entire visual field. I'm sure Margaret Livingstone and her neuroscience cabal will, at some point, figure out a way to actually reproduce this line-reduced visual field.

So when you look at a drawing of uniform line-weight, it is unnatural. If you look at something drawn in this idiom for any length of time, it will produce fatigue, because your brain is looking for something that isn't there - the same way that looking at a computer monitor for a long time produces fatigue, because your brain is seeking image resolution that doesn't exist. It is difficult to become conscious of this fatigue directly, because a well-drawn single-weight line drawing has everything in the right place, as Gibbons and Moebius have everything in the right place. So your conscious marker for cognitive legitimacy is met. But your unconscious need for variability of line weight goes hungry.

The only chance you have of experiencing a "natural" - that is, cognitively accurate - line drawing is if the line drawing has variable weight. However, not all variable-weight line drawings are equal. Why not? Because the cognitive process has a set of rules for the weight it assigns to each line segment it uses in reducing the visual field to information.

What are the rules? I have no fucking clue. I will tell you this - in life drawing class, they nag you a lot to make the lines thicker where weight is resting on the edge (say, the underside line of the butt of someone sitting). So there's an idea - mass and line weight go together. I personally have always tended to ignore this rule, and I suspect that the real rules are much more complex.

My contention, then, is that once in a blue moon, a Frank Miller intuitively grasps something very like the brain's own native set of line-weight rules and produces a sustained passage, such as Dark Knight Returns, in which he matches those rules and produces a comic that is visually effortless to read. Well, visually effortless for me, anyway. Let's not forget that brains are different from one another.

On the other hand, a Crumb or a Gilbert is deploying a set of line-weight rules that goes contrary to the brain's (my brain's) sense of where line weight should go. And this produces a different sensation than the no-variation-line fatigue. It produces a kind of recoil, a sense not of the unnaturally affectless, but the anti-naturally perverse.

(Another aside: my comments on the interaction of line with the brain are not meant to be taken as "Miller good/Gibbon bad." Good and bad do not depend on conformity with certain cognitive properties of the human mind.)

So what's the point of all this? The point is that this thinking about line in comics gives us a wide-ranging insight into the qualities of line that help to define our work as artists. Do we want to produce the subliminal effects of the uniform line weight, the naturally variable line weight, or the unnaturally variable line weight? Before art is an art, art is a craft. And any good craftsman will tell you - know your tools and master your tools. So when we try to understand what line means, we are trying to master one of the main tools of art.

More soon - or more likely, not so soon.

No Answers

There's a pair of paintings by Picasso that I've been fascinated with for years. He painted both of them on the same day, January 21, 1939. They portray the same pose as performed by two different models - Marie-Therese Walter and Dora Maar, both of whom he was involved with at the time:

Marie-Therese Walter

Dora Maar

I think that Picasso was trying to figure out which one to dump. He set up a single-variable experiment, in which the constants were time, composition, and pose, and the independent variable was the woman. Picasso the Man asked Picasso the Artist to tell him what to do. And these two paintings were what Picasso the Artist said.

Picasso the Artist didn't answer the question. He simply restated the question more clearly: he said that for Picasso the Man, Marie-Therese had more simplicity, more harmony, more beauty. And that Dora had more vitality, more excitement, and more conflict. The Artist simply threw the question, in more detail, back into the Man's court. The Artist said, "Here's how you see them. I can't tell you which one to choose - the answer to that lies in what kind of a man you are yourself, and what you want out of your life."

I have this feeling because, in completely different circumstances, I have had art fail to answer my questions as well. So naturally, I assume that what happened with me is directly applicable to Picasso. That's the limitation of individual perspective for you. I concluded this, from my own experience and from the evidence of Picasso's experiment:

Art's no good at answering questions, but it's very good at stating questions more clearly. It's good at increasing the crushing burden of choice, by clarifying the irreconcilable divergence of the options available. Art will prevent you from hiding from yourself what you are rejecting, and what you are accepting. But it has no answers. It cannot choose for you.

The Minoan, and the missing Arazu

First a little good news - I sold a painting! I finished this on Thursday, and Chicago super-collector Howard Tullman bought it on Friday:

The Minoan

The name derives from its inspiration, a striking sculpture found at the Palace at Knossos on Crete:

I'm excited and honored to join Howard's collection, which is a lot of fun to page through if you follow the link above.

As long as I'm doing a little news-digest here, Claudia wrote an interesting post touching on this drawing of her at her wonderful blog:

Claudia models at Spring St., where I've had the pleasure of drawing her many times - this was from a recent 80-minute pose. Incidentally, she has the comparatively unusual Buffy eye shape we were discussing recently.

Enough of this real-world stuff though. Let's get back to some considerations of ideas. I was going to reply to Arazu's comment about the unquantifiability of soulfulness in painting, but when I went to find it, it was missing. My reply to it in the comment thread was still there, but the source comment itself disappeared. Weird.

Arazu; and let me be frank with you, I know Arazu in the corporeal world, where he is quite an excellent guy - this Arazu, was saying something along the lines that unquantifiability doesn't really exist, and if a painting has a quality of soulfulness, and this quality is not quantified, that only means we haven't found or applied the relevant metric yet. I think I'm fairly summarizing the gist of his argument. Arazu, you see, is an arch-materialist, and he delights in winging a spanner into the works whenever any idle talk of souls comes up.

Let me address the argument in two ways, from a materialist perspective and an epistemological perspective.

1. The Materialist Argument

This is the less compelling and ultimately less interesting argument. Let's say that we have some quality in a painting which we denominate "soul." It will be sufficient for the time being to treat one particular aspect of this quality: ambiguity.

People are ambiguous - it is nearly impossible to formulate a final statement about any among them. And in fully-realized paintings of people, this ambiguity persists. One particularly effective way to render this sense of ambiguity is to make the eyes difficult to read. Even within this sub-topic of a sub-topic, there is a huge range of modes, including the famous "each half of the face has a different expression" technique. But I'd like to talk about pictorial vagueness as a means of rendering difficult-to-read eyes. Consider Velazquez's painting of Mars:

You cannot see exactly what is going on with his eyes, because they're in shadow, and the shadow is treated softly. You know pretty much where they are, but not their exact shape or disposition. There is an air of menace to them, but perhaps there is an air of melancholy as well, or grief. Who can say? The ambiguity of the representation produces what the science-for-poets among us might call a Schrodinger-esque probability waveform. Clarity of perception of the eyes would collapse the waveform: they would be one place or another, they would mean one thing or another.

So in what sense is this unquantifiable? In the sense that a particular set of spatial eye-values (direction, size, shape, &c.) cannot be assigned. A range can be generated, however, which amounts to partial quantization. So long as the range is maintained as the most specific possible statement about the eyes, then the ambiguity finds room to persist. Keep in mind, the range can be very small, and still set up a vibrating field of possibilities. Consider a better-lit Velazquez portrait:

Now, her eyes are well-lit and specified in their spatial characteristics. Sure, they're looking in inconsistent directions, but with regard to the properties we were talking about, there's a lot of information. But if you were looking at this much closer up (and I'm sorry I couldn't find you a super-high-resolution image), you'd see that actually, there's still a lot of incompleteness. Before you can resolve all your questions about the eyes, you reach the point where the image dissolves into meaningless brushstrokes. The specificity slips through the cracks. The ambiguity remains.

There are many, many ways, in this microscopic instance, to produce and maintain an ambiguity range. You can use brushstroke size; you can use indistinct color separation; you can paint one layer incompletely over another layer, so that both layers inform perception but the represented object cannot be firmly assigned to either. All these qualities can be quantized, even if they are fiendishly complicated: but they can only be quantized within a range, not to an accurate specific value.

Nonetheless, this is the weak argument. Quantization-within-a-range is not categorically dissimilar from total quantization. If you're looking for soul in a "+/- 3%," you've already conceded the point. And I have no intention of conceding the point. I just wanted to clarify to Arazu the limits of this quantifiability that he is so on about.

2. The Epistemological Argument

Now I will turn to an argument I have been having with Arazu for years, in which he can never remember or account for my main point, because it makes no sense to him. My point is introduced quite well in a comment I first read in a book by Robert Anton Wilson that my old roommate Mike had, to the effect that the map is not the territory. A little Wikipedia surfing suggests that this observation originates with a fellow named Alfred Korzybski, so there you go.

Arazu thinks that total quantization of a material phenomenon is logically equivalent to elimination of an unquantifiable spiritual entity arising from that phenomenon, which for the sake of argument we are calling "soul."

I contend that Arazu is looking in the wrong place.

The material phenomenon is a map. The spiritual entity attached to it is the territory. Look - I dissected a bunch of human brains when I was working in gross anatomy. There's no soul in there. The brain is the map. The soul is the territory.

Phrasing this another way: at some point, there will be a complete neural and chemical description of the emotion of, for instance, anger. This description will not be anger itself. It will be the physical substrate in which the emotion resides. A complete understanding of this description will provide no clue at all of the experience of anger. Anger itself cannot be quantified.

Currently, one can find photographs, if one thinks of the correct Google Image keyword combination (which I have not) of an X-pattern of activated neurons in the brain of a monkey looking at an image of an X. That's pretty cool! But comprehending this pattern of neurons is not the same as comprehending something even as simple as the monkey's perception of the X.

The subjective experience of these various states - the X, the emotion of anger, the ambiguity of the eye - are categorically unquantifiable. All quantifiable properties - the pattern of neural activation, the neuro-chemical apparatus, the range of spatial properties of the painted eye - are simply irrelevant to the argument. These are all physical traces of spiritual phenomena.

How can we say that something with no direct physical embodiment, such as seeing an X, being angry, or evaluating an eye, exists? This is simple. Because we have experiences all of these states. We are not free to say they do not exist, because we have direct evidence of their existence using the only apparatus available to us - our own consciousness.

So when I say that a painting has a spiritual property, that it has soul, what I mean more specifically is that a painting has a set of properties which reliably trigger an awareness of soulfulness in the viewer when the painting is viewed.

Is the painting a map or a territory? I would argue that it is a map. Anything that can be quantized with regard to the properties that are being discussed, is a map. Anything that has the properties themselves, is a territory.

By what means is the map converted to the territory? By means of the process of viewing it. The calipers examine a painting and see a map; the mind examines a painting and sees a territory. The objectively existing map irresistably triggers an impression of territory.

The process of becoming a good painter is a process of learning and mastering the "irresistable trigger." There need be nothing mysterious about the triggering process. Some of it is mysterious to most of us, but ultimately, all of it is knowable (even if unpredictable). This blog spends a lot of time covering neurology, and a lot of time covering the mechanics of paint. Mastering the interaction of visual objects with neurological mechanisms, and mastering the painting medium itself, are among the tools available to the artist in seeking to trigger perception of territory when presenting a map.

But just because the territory we are pursuing - the garden of the soul - is linked in so many and such complex ways with maps, does not mean that we should expect the properties of maps to apply to the soul itself. The soul is not a map; the soul cannot be quantized. The soul resides in paintings to the extent that the paintings trigger an awakening of the soul that resides in us. That the soul resides in us - call it what you will - is beyond dispute, because we are making use of it right now to think all this over.

QED, Arazu, my materialist friend.

P.S. I apologize for immoderate use of the term "quantize" when "quantify" would likely do. I am a rather ardent fan of the letter Z, and use words that contain it whenever possible.

Eye-Mouth; Mouth-Eye

So a while back, as you most likely no longer remember, I said that I had something interesting to say about the face of sadly-deceased* character actor Randall Tex Cobb:


and its relationship with the paintings of Francis Bacon (also sadly deceased):

*Randall Tex Cobb, it turns out, is alive and well. I must have been thinking of some other guy. Bacon remains dead.

Well, I've been meaning to let you know my thinking on the resemblance. It is this: in both Bacon's version of Pope Innocent X, and Cobb, the mouth is much more prominent than the eyes - in fact, the eyes are nearly eliminated. This effect is more striking in Cobb's most famous role, in Raising Arizona:
His eyes, squinting, are nearly hidden in the folds of his face, while his mouth is framed by the beard and moustache and enlarged by the omnipresent cigar.

There is something horrific about both figures - Cobb's apocalyptic bounty hunter, and Bacon's pope. Let me introduce a different thought to try to explain this quality of the horrific.

As you most likely have also forgotten by now, I wrote at one point that I suspected that Margaret Livingstone's research would eventually reveal a prioritization of neural recognition of facial features, with eyes ranking above mouths. Score! She kindly sent me a paper that included this fascinating graph, derived from studies of facial recognition neurons in macaques:

You will notice that eyes get a lot more neural firepower than mouths. My contention, therefore, is this: since when we "see" a face, a large proportion of our processing capability goes into understanding the eyes, and a much smaller proportion into understanding the mouth, there is something horrific about a condition where the eyes are minimized or eliminated. Let's go hunting for examples - it's not hard, once you think about it:

Yes, there's Giger's immortal design for the alien in Alien. Giger, an artist possessed, like Bacon, of a natural sense of the horrific, seems to have single-handedly spawned a tradition of eyeless monsters with his design. This hideous thing turns up again in Lord of the Rings:

Disclaimer: I haven't read the books, so I don't know if the Mouth of Sauron is described that way there too. But now that Peter Jackson has gotten the ball rolling again, it's a short leap to the latest deployment, in Clash of the Titans:


Look, you might say, a face that's all mouth - be it Jaws or the Sarlacc - is always horrific, because it's going to bite you. I'm not arguing that that's not true; I'm arguing that there is a neurological component to the fearfulness of the image. After all, a rabid dog is going to bite you too, but why is this the cover of Cujo?

The biting is scary; the face without eyes is horrific. When we stumble across stimuli that provoke a non-linear response, it is always a good idea to check the machinery receiving the stimuli, which is to say, ourselves. So this is the basis of my contention that there's a processing issue involved in the horrific property of the eyeless face.

And I've thought of a tricky and exciting bit of evidence in favor of this proposition! Consider the reverse instance: a mouthless face. The first instance I became aware of was the cover of an old edition of Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream:


I am not the only one to note the thematic and visual resemblance of this image to a memorable scene in The Matrix:

The only other instance of this image that I can think of in pop culture is the poster for the underrated movie of Silent Hill (a film lousy with eyeless mouth-monsters, by the way):

Now, I would not describe these images as horrific - would you? The term uncanny comes more to mind. Thinking about it this way, I think the topic has something interesting to teach us about the always-elusive distinction between the horrific and the uncanny. Consider this:

When we see the eyeless face, we immediately know something is wrong, because our brains are looking for eyes first, and mouth second.

When we see the mouthless face, there is a tiny, tiny delay before we realize something is wrong, because our brains go through the following steps: 1. Recognize outline of head 2. Search for eyes 3. Search for mouth.

So what this teaches us is that the horrific corresponds with an immediately apparent breaking of the ordinary laws of nature. The uncanny corresponds with a subtle breaking of the same laws. The uncanny inspires terror because we first achieve comfort with the image, and then suddenly we realize the image is, in fact, unnatural. The horrific inspires immediate revulsion, but the uncanny inspires deep fear: fear that either the reality we thought we could trust, or our own rationality that we thought we could trust, are in fact untrustworthy.

Let me give you a really good example of this difference which comes to mind. It has to do with two nightmares a friend of mine once had:

1. She found herself beside a highway where there had been a massive multi-car pileup. Everybody involved in the accident had been mutilated and killed. There were bodies, blood, and gore everywhere.

2. Two weeks later, she dreamt that she came to the same place. But now it smelled terrible, because the bodies hadn't been removed, and they were rotting on the ground.

The first nightmare is horrifying: it is a scene of ghastly violence.

The second nightmare is uncanny: certainly, it is natural for a dead body left in the open to rot. But a tiny fraction of a moment later, one realizes it is profoundly unnatural for time to pass in a continuous dream-world during the period that the dreamer is not dreaming it. Two weeks passed in the dream - but where was this dream during that time? What parallel world did the dream inhabit? This second nightmare, this profoundly unnerving nightmare, breaks the rules of nature as we understand them. Either nature is mad, or we are.

This proposition about the nature of the uncanny also helps to explain why we have so many more uncanny experiences as children than we do as adults. When we are children, we really do encounter many more subtle, delayed-awareness mistakes about the laws of reality - because we're still learning those laws. The sudden revelation that something we thought happened one way, in fact is happening another way, is more frequent in childhood, and it is often accompanied by a twinge of fear: fear of the uncanny.

I'm not sure what, if anything, this little essay has to do with art, but I hope it has at least provided some interesting material to mull over.

The Right Arm of Madame X

Geesh - it's been a while! I apologize, in case you were actually waiting for a post; I was away on business for my actual job, in Minneapolis, where the snow was. And just generally crushed under work.

Down to business. Last night at Spring Street Studios, I ran into a little bit of synchronicity. Maya, the model (from Uzbekhistan!), struck a pose where her left arm was positioned very similarly to that of Virginie Gautreau's right arm in John Singer Sargent's Madame X (which, incidentally, is at the Met, if you want to go there and look at it yourself). Here's Maya's arm - my apologies for crudity, it was a 5-minute pose:

And here's the Sargent painting:

Striking, que non? It was very exciting to see. But why was this so synchronous? Well, because I had been thinking about the Sargent painting anyway, owing to having stumbled across this post at Claudia's excellent blog, Museworthy (it's in the blog roll on the right here).

The key part that I was thinking about was this (and it's supported with biographical details in the full post):

I just can’t get past the nagging sense that Madame X is a study in vanity – a portrait of a haughty, pretentious, and, to some degree, fraudulent woman whose mission in life was to marry well, move in prestigious circles, attend parties, and pose for the prominent artists of the time. YAWN. Give me Dora Maar. Or one of Toulouse Lautrec’s can-can girls. Or Van Gogh’s prostitutes. Or ANY person besides this narcissistic social climber.

I found this troubling, and it took me a while to locate the concept that I was intuitively applying to it. But before I get to that, I'd like to address Claudia directly, in case she happens to read this: Claudia, I disagree with you on this point, but I love your blog and respect your analysis and opinions.

The concept I was searching for was "negative capability." This concept apparently originates with John Keats, who says:

I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Now, as in the case of pataphysics, I have an idiosyncratic use of this concept, which originates with the friend who first introduced me to it, and whom my current research reveals to have totally not known what he was talking about - but his misinterpretation made the concept more useful.

First of all, he thought it was Ezra Pound who cooked it up. And he thought it meant, or at least described it to mean, "The capability of the person partaking of a work of art to suspend ordinary ethical judgments in contemplation of the characters, actions, and ideas depicted therein." This is captured more simply in the title of a book about David Cronenberg shooting Naked Lunch: Everything is Permitted (apparently an old phrase from the assassins, now that I google it).

I think this second version of the concept of negative capability is tremendously important in interacting with art. There is one school of thought that says that art influences what you think and do, so art ought to depict and promote goodness. And I credit this school of thought with validity. It leads to an art of virtue, a scrubbed-clean art that expresses what is neutral or good.

There is a second school of thought, which I personally subscribe to, which says that art is not the same as thinking and doing in real life. In art, phenomena may occur which one can think and do in real life, and which one ought not to think and do in real life. One ought not to be an Iago or a Stavrogin.

Within this second school of thought, it is fine and good to condemn an Iago or a Stavrogin if you meet him on the street. But when you encounter an Iago or a Stavrogin in a piece of art, you must exert negative capability: you must set aside your ordinary revulsion and examine what you see with zero moral bias.

Why? Because Iago and Stavrogin are as surely a part of the condition of being as are Joan of Arc and Konstantin Levin. We are enjoined as participants in the world to do good only; but we are required as free agents to know good and evil alike. And if we do not enact evil, then we must learn it by self-examination and by examination of the works of insightful men and women - the artists, the philosophers, and the priests. If we do not know about evil also, then we are incomplete souls; crippled.

It is insufficient to say, "I do not have evil in me." Primarily because it is not true. On this point, I side more with Christ than Socrates; we all have evil in us. We will be blind-sided by our evil impulses if we do not train ourselves in the knowledge of evil.

But, argue you, to behold evil is to absorb it - it is to let the devil through the door.

This is true. You cannot look at an Iago or a Stavrogin, you cannot really see him, without becoming cognizant of evil in yourself. To look deeply at any phenomenon with moral content is an act not of seeing, but of recognizing.

That evil has just now entered, as you beheld it, is an illusion. Evil is already in the house; Iago and Stavrogin merely let you name it and count its legs. Innocence, it is true, that state of childhood, has no cognizance of evil. But likewise it has no cognizance of good. Without the option of evil, no good choice has moral content. To take up the burden of knowledge of evil is part of the task of becoming mature, of becoming a human adult. And it is at the feet of the masters, of the Shakespeares and the Dostoyevskys, that we become adults - become free, and becoming free, gain the ability to choose to do good.

So this, for me, is why negative capability (the Ezra Pound version) is so important in interacting with art.

This is also why I disagree with Claudia about Madame X. Claudia's analysis is absolutely correct. This painting is a portrait of vanity. And it is particularly repellent because Sargent himself does not display negative capability in his work. He does not take the detached and benevolent approach that says, "This is what this is; this is human too." No, he supports and indulges the vanity, he makes the image reflect the vain self-delusion of the subject.

I have always kind of assumed that Sargent had a big crush on Gautreau (I have also assumed, without bothering to read a single biographical thing about him, that he was a homosexual who preferred to hang out with women and straight men). So I think that he thought Gautreau was a dazzling marvelous creature, and he wanted to pay tribute to her fabulousness with this troubling and wonderful painting.

Fortunately for us, Sargent the artist gets the better of Sargent the man. Or, we might say, the human condition cannot be concealed. We do not entirely buy into the ambition of the painting. We see, as Claudia sees, that it is the outcome of a complicity between a vain woman and a smitten man. And this too increases our wisdom about vice and weakness, and enriches our understanding of the range of human nature. In real life, these vices are cruel, banal and destructive. Transmogrified into an artistic image, they blaze with life and light - they are redeemed.

This is important. I believe that there is nothing in the soul that can be called, in itself, evil and ugly. Evil and ugliness creep in when we decide what to do with the material from which we are made. The finest of wicked men make their will to evil into art, and the art saves them from their monstrosity. The rest of them hide their will to evil, and it poisons them. And the worst of them give their will to evil free rein, and they become evil in fact, and not just in inclination.

But Sargent is small change on the scale of corruption. Sargent, a gentle and upright man, doesn't really know about sin. I can think of a painter who is much more troubling - who really puts our negative capability to the test. My friends, if you don't already know him, allow me to introduce you to Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, called Balthus:

Buffyverse Eye-ology

While we're talking about curvature of the lower lid outward of the midpoint of the eye - there's Faith:


And there's Jenny Calendar's creepy uncle:


Wow, I noticed something about Buffy that doesn't already have a whole dissertation about it somewhere on the Internet.

Joss Whedon totally owes me a cookie.

On Eyes: Point of Focus, Lower Lid Shape

A while back, Pengo asked if I might write something about eyes. I've been procrastinating on that, because, well, eyes have been pretty well covered and it's not that easy to find illustrations for the few points I have to make. But I do have a few things to say about eyes that I haven't read already elsewhere. Here are the less important points:

1. Point of Focus - or lack of it. In humans, both eyes tend to look at the same thing. We are very good at reading what a person is looking at - from a straightforward look at something in the far distance, to a cross-eyed look at something close to the person.

Imagine two dotted lines extending forward from the eyes. Each eye is aimed down its own line. It is natural for the lines to be parallel (looking straight ahead into the distance), and it is natural for them to converge (some degree of cross-eye). There is no natural circumstance where the lines diverge.

However, there is a strong emotional content to such a representation. It is not an inward look: it is a defocused outward look. It virtually always reads as if the person's soul had been crushed by some circumstance or suffering, leaving them not introspective but vacant. It is a tremendously powerful configuration of the eyes if portrayed properly. I first became aware of it when I saw the poster for Julie Taymor's one good movie to date, Titus. The expression on Anthony Hopkins's face says it all, and I sat down at the time to figure out why:

The points of focus diverge. I came across this exceedingly rare depiction again recently, in a self-portrait by Israeli-Russian artist Yefim Ladizhinsky:

This is an effective tool to keep in your bag of tricks as a painter. And that's what I have to say about that.

2. Lower Lid Shape.

Artists give a lot of thought to the upper lid of the eye, because it is in the raising, lowering, and squinching of this lid that emotions are most directly expressed. To the extent we think about the lower eyelid at all, we are accustomed to thinking of it as a circle arc symmetric about the horizontal midpoint of the eye. This is almost never true. In most caucasians (and let's face it, most of what I know is about caucasians) there is a slight dip downward toward the inner corner:

After a little messing around with things that don't work, most artists also eventually figure out this shape, and apply it without further individuation to all eyes. Bad idea, artists!

I first became conscious of the reverse configuration when I was trying to figure out why Sarah Michelle Gellar had strangely emotional eyes. Check her out:

That's right, my friends. Her lower lids curve down to their lowest points farther to the sides of her head than that axis of symmetry. This makes her look very emotional, pretty much all the time. I have a hypothesis about this too.

Because the lowest points in her lower lids are not where we expect them to be, we have a preconscious impression that something is actively weighing them down. And what's the one thing that usually weighs eyelids down? Tears. Therefore, we have a vague impression that her lower lids are always brimming with tears. Of course, on Buffy, they usually are. But even when they aren't, we think they are.

This lower lid shape is fairly rare, but people who have this shape have an unusual emotional intensity to their eyes. Most artists don't know to depict this shape because even when they are looking at it, they don't see past the stereotyped eye-shape template in their minds. Well, except for the artists who draw Buffy comics:

Sooner or later, most of them figure it out.

All Packed Up

You know what this is?This is a blurry cell-phone photograph of my painting Tree of Knowledge getting packed in a beautiful crate made by Alexandra's dad. It was selected for the Au Naturel group show at Clatsop Community College in Astoria, Oregon. So if all goes well, I may never see it in person again. All goes well = someone buys it. I can't make it to the show opening myself.

Can I just say, this crate is gorgeous? I had passed on the measurements to Alexandra's dad, and the interior fits them perfectly. At all pressure points, it is lined with soft padding. Its lid is attached with powerful hinges, and is held shut by ten screws. It is one of the simplest and most satisfying utilitarian objects I have had the pleasure to own.

Now I need to call the shipping company.

Edges and Edge Detection Part 2: A Word from Harold Speed

Well, back to the business at hand.

It should be clear by now that I have bothered to read only three serious books on art: the Rodin, the Livingstone, and the Harold Speed. I mean, I've skimmed through some other stuff, but you're going to have to wait on me developing some discipline if you're just checking in here to find out what I have to say about Ruskin.

With the mighty armor of my ignorance in mind, let's see what Harold Speed has to say about edges. Whereas Livingstone covers the topic in terms of the empirical mechanics of the nervous system, Speed (in 1924) speculates on the origin and significance of edge-detection [p. 40]:

Sight, as the accurate perception of visual things, is a faculty that has only gradually been developed by humanity in its upward march, and few people realize how little they really see of the marvelous things happening on the retina of their eyes. Sight as a faculty is not so essential to our survival as some of our other senses, such as touch. We live more by touch than sight, and the average person uses his eyes more for the purpose of giving him information about the solidity and general felt shape of things, than for the purpose of observing the color sensations on the retina. We cannot move a yard in front of us without first knowing if there is anything solid to stand upon or something hard in front of us that we might knock ourselves against. And these are all touch ideas. But by associating touch with sight in the very early years of our bodily existence, we learn from much knocking of ourselves, and many falls, to associate sight with touch in so intimate a way that eventually the habit of seeing the touch sense in things becomes habitual; and instead of the color masses on our retina, we see an appearance of a solid world in front of us.

...how much more charming English once was, and only recently too! This concept, that sight is in its utilitarian aspect fundamentally nothing more than an aid to a touch-model of the world, is a very interesting concept. And it seems likely to me to be true, to a very large extent. Speed then uses this concept to illuminate the utilitarian origin of line in art [pp. 42-3]:

...it is only very slowly that humanity has perceived the facts of visual appearance, only gradually that we are opening our eyes, only very slowly that we have developed the faculty of sight. Each newly added fact being, as it were, a new instrument of expression added to the orchestra at the disposal of the artist. After the simple outline filled in with a little local color, we get a little shading to indicate form. And this simple formula was refined to a very high degree in the art which we call primitive, right up to the time of Botticelli...

[Then he lists some developments through 1700 A.D.]

...the whole of this growth of visual knowledge started from the outlined form, which was the result not so much of any attempt to represent what was seen as to satisfy the idea of solid things outside himself man had formed from his sense of touch. The art of the Egyptians, which is the foundation of our Western art, is obsessed by this.

To use Speed's terminology, the line is defined as serving the purpose of defining "a solid object as revealed by the sense of touch with a boundary in space." This is really fascinating! Speed contends that the representational line is not, conceptually speaking, a visual object at all! It is a visual signifier for a tactile phenomenon.

Well, that's also pretty obvious. Most visible things are touchable. But when Speed re-orders the priorities of the system of perceptions, placing touch prior to and superior to sight, he opens an avenue of evaluation of sight that is very fruitful.

To deal with simple things first, his analysis corresponds strongly with Livingstone's experimental results, which indicate that the high-resolution monochromatic edge-detection mechanism of the nervous system is very old and very much related to figuring out what's around us in space. Appreciation of the beauty of butterflies evolves later.

To get to the meat of it, Speed's analysis gives us an insight into the tremendous visceral quality that a beautiful line evokes, even though line is seen, and sight is the most outward and un-visceral of the senses. Let's look again at this Schiele picture we were studying a few days ago:


We were talking previously about the qualities of line in Schiele's work. Let's think about line again in the context of touch. When I was in high school, I had an art teacher who referred one time to "all those grotty hairs" in Schiele's nudes. What he was responding to was the tactile sense implicit in line. The hairs made his lip curl in revulsion - a visceral response - because he was imagining touching them. Take another look at that armpit hair. You can feel it. You can feel the knobs of bone in the elbow and spine. Schiele's line is expressive not only because it has a riveting and unique shape, but also because it induces a strong sense of touch. It strongly defines the quality of "a solid object as revealed by the sense of touch with a boundary in space."

Now let's get back to a Picasso portrait we also discussed before:

I'll never get tired of looking at her.

Anyhow, part of the sensuality of this portrait is that Picasso has developed a system of line that gives you a strong tactile sense of the hair. Unlike Schiele's armpits, you want to touch this hair - you want to run your fingers through it, because the line makes apparent that it is soft and voluminous. The sense of soft volume extends to the face, where the smooth curves of the cheeks reinforce the impression. Almost no shading - but a gut-level impression of volume and consistency.

I'm not particularly going anywhere with this thought, except that I wanted to add the concept of the tactility of line, as a representation of edge, to your mental catalogue as we continue to discuss edges and edge detection. I think it's important, in terms of comprehending the cognitive stakes of the inquiry, and how these cognitive stakes influence the aesthetics that we are constructing or reflecting as artists.

But I would like to add that the most sensual paintings are often the ones with the strongest implied tactility. Or, abandoning the question of touching the thing, the strongest depiction of volume, consistency, and texture of the thing-in-itself. Abandoning our topic of edges for a moment, I'd like to discuss a painting which I think of as one of the sexiest paintings I've ever run into. It was at a retrospective at the Tel Aviv Art Museum of contemporary Israeli artist Elie Shamir. It's called Miri with a Jug:


There are all sorts of reasons I think of this as a sexy painting, but we'll keep close to the topic at hand for a minute, which is the sense of a thing as a tactile thing, as having substance. So let's discuss the way that substance contributes to this painting being sexy. In this respect, there are two staggering passages, which you can appreciate better in this helpful closeup:

The first is in her right hand (our left). In that series of almost chaotic brushstrokes (the result of a painting technique the show made clear he has been refining for years), Shamir evokes blocky, strong fingers. You can tell how these fingers feel - they are mighty fingers, substantial fingers. They have a grace defined by strength. And the strength is perceived, not at the visual level, but at the tactile level.

Now you might be thinking the second passage I want to bring to your attention is her right breast (our left). Nope. It's nice, but any fool can paint a breast getting squished. It's good, but it's not unique.

No, the second passage I find remarkable is her left breast (our right). Particularly the line of slightly lighter brown extending up from the nipple to the shoulder. That line is where the flesh folds forward. Why does it fold forward? Because the mass of fat in the body of the breast is dragging down on an insufficiently robust internal system of suspensory ligaments. Or, to put it less fancily, it sags. Because the tissue cannot support it, it folds the skin, which must support it as well. This is a tremendously subtle and specific observation of the substance and consistency of the body. It is unromantic, and real, and, to me, overpowering.

So of all the reasons that I think of this painting as dazzlingly sexy, tactility is an important one. This is not some imaginary Female Nude: this is a real woman, with sturdy fingers and heavy breasts, and the tactility of her herselfness will knock you down if you let it.

Hullu paljon työtä tekee, viisas pääsee vähemmällä

Well, I get two posts for the price of one! Here's the English version of yesterday's post, but I promise I'll write something new later on today. Well, I'll try to, anyway.

Greetings Oulu!

Through the magic of Google Analytics, I can see that we have a visitor or two from Oulu, in Finland. And through the magic of Google Translator, I can write to you in Finnish - but I apologize if the Finnish is terrible, or even incomprehensible.

I wanted to write something specifically for you, and this reminded me of my admiration for Akseli Gallen-Kallela:


I discovered the work of Gallen-Kallela not long ago, at a time when I was feeling constricted by the set of assumptions I had made about my own techniques. He helped remind me that there is a tremendous range of possibility in painting, and that painting is as much playful as anything else. In the context of a sense of narrative national and mythological composition common to Russia, Finland, and several Balkan states, Gallen-Kallela introduced a sense of delight and magic through his use of rich, even reckless, color. I loved his color, his lines, and his commitment to doing what he was doing, without apologies. At a critical time, he loosened up my sense of what I could do as well. As you can see, my work has reflected his ideas a little bit since then:





...and if you don't happen to like Gallen-Kallela yourself, I apologize for bringing your attention back to him. I wanted to acknowledge my gratitude for your interest all the way from Oulu, and I hope you are enjoying this blog.

One last note - my model Vadim is from an ethnic group that straddles the border between Finland and Russia. He was born on the Russian side, but much of his family was raised in Finland. He is a delightful individual to work with - very funny, with a dark outlook on human nature.

So...

That last post? I noticed that we were getting a bunch of hits from Oulu, Finland. I thought, "How can I welcome our new Finnish friends?" So I translated a post about Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela into Finnish using Google's dubious translator. I'll post the English version tomorrow...

Tervehdyksiä Oulu!

Kautta taika Google Analytics, huomaan, että meillä on vieras tai kaksi Oulussa, Suomessa. Ja kautta taika Google Translator, voin kirjoittaa teille Suomi - mutta pyydän anteeksi, jos Suomi on kauhea, tai edes ymmärtää.

Halusin kirjoittaa jotain erityisesti teille, ja se muistutti minua ihailuni Akseli Gallen-Kallela:


Olen löytänyt työtä Gallen-Kallela ei kauan sitten, jolloin minulla oli tunne ahdas, että joukko oletuksia olin tehnyt siitä oman tekniikoita. Hän auttoi minua muistuttaa, että on olemassa valtava joukko mahdollisuutta maalaus, ja että maalaus on yhtä leikkisä kuin mitään muuta. Yhteydessä tunnetta kerronnan kansallisten ja mytologisia kokoonpano yhteisen Venäjän, Suomen, ja useat Balkanin maat, Gallen-Kallela käyttöön tunne iloa ja magian avulla hän käyttää runsaasti, jopa piittaamaton, väri. Rakastin hänen väri, hänen linjat, ja hän on sitoutunut tekemään, mitä hän oli tekemässä, ei anteeksi. Kriittisellä hetkellä, hän irrottaa jopa minun mielessä, mitä voisin tehdä samoin. Kuten huomaatte, työni on otettu ajatuksiaan hieman jälkeen:


... ja jos ei tapahdu, kuten Gallen-Kallela itse, pyydän anteeksi tuo teidän huomion takaisin hänelle. Halusin ilmoittaa kiitokseni etu aina Oulusta, ja toivon, että nautitte tästä blogista.

Viimeinen huomata - Oma malli Vadim on peräisin etninen ryhmä, että kummallakin puolella rajaa Suomen ja Venäjän välillä. Hän oli syntynyt Venäjän puolella, mutta paljon hänen perheensä on esitetty Suomessa. Hän on ihana henkilön kanssa - erittäin hauska, ja tumma näkymät ihmisluontoon.

Pataphysics

If you'll pardon a digression from the main topic, of edges, I have been thinking about this issue of Degas trying futilely to unify Line and Color. This struck me as a branch of pataphysics. Pataphysics is a fairly annoying concept invented by Alfred Jarry, of Ubu Roi fame:
He defines it as "the science of imaginary solutions." He also writes some complicated stuff, mocking over-analytic methodology. I actually don't know much about pataphysics, or Alfred Jarry, or Ubu Roi. But the idea of a science of imaginary solutions stuck with me.

However, it was in a slightly garbled form: what I remembered it as was "the science of solving imaginary problems." And for the purpose of this little note, let's just pretend that's what pataphysics is.

So Degas is a pataphysician. He's trying to solve an imaginary problem: the alleged fragmentation of Line and Color from some original, unknown unity is his problem, and re-unifying them is the solution he's seeking. As we found in the last post, this problem simply does not exist, and therefore does not admit of a solution.

In an earlier post, we also looked at the pataphysical problem of eliminating the perceptual distinction between figure and ground. The Impressionists went to great lengths to present a unified visual field in which the figure and ground were part of a continuous optical experience. As neuroscience has advanced, it has become clear that the figure/ground dichotomy is not a matter of socialization or culture. It's a matter of basic visual processing. And even without the revelations of neuroscience, it should have been clear to the Impressionists that depth perception makes the figure/ground distinction inevitably clear, because we can see the relative distances of perceived objects. But they carried on with their pataphysical work anyway...

Let's look at another example of pataphysical art-making. This is a painting by Euan Uglow (1932-2000), a Cornish figurative painter whose book I would own if it weren't so expensive:


If you click on the picture and look at it closely, you'll see that it's covered in weird little marks. What are those? Let's let Wickipedia do the explaining:

With a meticulous method of painting directly from life, Uglow frequently took months or years to complete a painting. Planes are articulated very precisely, edges are sharply defined, and colours are differentiated with great subtlety. His type of realism has its basis in geometry, starting with the proportion of the canvas. Uglow preferred that the canvas be a square, a golden rectangle, or a rectangle of exact root value, as is the case with the Root Five Nude (1976).^[1] He then carried out careful measurements at every stage of painting, a method Coldstream had imparted to him and which is identified with the painters of the Euston Road School. Standing before the subject to be painted, Uglow registered measurements by means of a metal instrument of his own design (derived from a modified music stand); with one eye closed and with the arm of the instrument against his cheek, keeping the calibrations at a constant distance from the eye, the artist could take the measure of an object or interval to compare against other objects or intervals he saw before him. Such empirical measurements enable an artist to paint what the eye sees without the use of conventional perspective. The surfaces of Uglow's paintings carry many small horizontal and vertical markings, where he recorded these coordinates so that they could be verified against reality.

...oooookay, Euan. Why don't we take a look at another one?


Again with the finicky measurements. Does anybody really give a hoot whether or not his work corresponds with phi? I don't. I'm gonna guess you don't. There is simply no problem here to be solved. It reminds me of the most devastating review of David Cronenberg's Crash I read: "The movie explores the link between eroticism and car crashes. Unfortunately, there is no link between eroticism and car crashes." The problem of applying phi arbitrarily precisely to arbitrarily small subdivisions of the human body is an imaginary problem. To try to solve it simply invites obsessive-compulsive behavior. It cannot be solved because it doesn't exist.

Oh, and you remember the part about "no perspective, but rather what the eye sees"? The eye is equivalent to about a 50 mm lens for 35 mm film. How is that more "true" than, say, the perspectival distortions associated with a 25 mm or 100 mm lens? Or with one-point perspective?

And yet, I absolutely love Uglow's paintings. There is a sense of simplicity and light and mass to them that seems to me completely unique and charming and counter-intuitive, because they look, in so many ways, like paint-by-numbers pictures from a hobby kit. They have large patches of uniform color! But they work. So you can't say he got nothing for all his pataphysical trouble.

Now we have - Degas, unifying Color and Line, the Impressionists, unifying Figure and Ground, and Euan Uglow, unifying Phi and Figure. All three entities are working on pataphysics. And yet, by working on insoluble non-existent problems, they drive themselves to make magnificent works!

Art-making was not always pataphysical:

There we have Albrecht Durer demonstrating the laborious application of perspective to the great subject of art (naked ladies). The innovation of the laws of perspective was not an issue of pataphysics, but of physics. And it took us from here:

To here:
Many will argue that a loss of primal emotionality was involved in this shift. I am not one of those who will argue that. I will argue that for any "word" art lost in this advance, it gained a thousand, and that the depth of religious feeling in the Da Vinci outmatches that of the icon because it is faith expressed in the context of a sense of reason, of reality, which outmatches our own. Can an ape convince you of faith better than a superman? You must answer this for yourself - but whatever your answer, it is inarguable that the problem of perspective was a physics problem, not a pataphysics problem, and it was amenable to solution, and solving it expanded the range of possibilities of art. Da Vinci can paint an icon, if he pleases, but an icon painter cannot paint a Da Vinci.

I could raise other physics problems - value, shadow, color - but you get the point. Many of these problems have been solved satisfactorily, leaving the modern period to grapple with imaginary problems if it wishes to grapple with problems at all.

So the questions, which are at least intriguing, if not troubling, are:

1. Does it matter that you are devoting your life to pataphysics if, on the way, you produce remarkable art?

I would answer that it does not. If the process of problem-solving, and not the solution itself, is the font of rewards, so be it. We must all follow the task that is before us.

2. Is there any way to distinguish between a physical and a pataphysical problem?

I would maintain that you'd have to go case by case. In many cases, the specific answer is "yes." But in the general sense, the answer is "no." There is no abstract and universal algorithm for separating real and imaginary problems.

3. Given this issue, how many problems that we are working on now are, in fact, pataphysical?

A man likes to know if he's wasting his time. Consider the issues I address in my work: psychology, the complexity of the three-dimensional surface, self-possession of the nude figure, the "zero space," or metaphysical space, of isolation of the Figure, in an elementary state, from both the figure and the world as commonly understood. I happen to think these are worthwhile pursuits. But they may be as surely pataphysical as Degas's science-fictionistic linecolor and Uglow's ludicrous obsession with 1.61803.

The upshot, then, is that we cannot know. We can be fairly sure we're not working on discovering one point perspective, but we can't know with any certainty if what we are doing is entirely pointless or merely mostly pointless.

We keep at it because the work along the way can be magnificent. And more crucially, we keep at it because we have no capacity to do otherwise. Art is not freedom, it is slavery. But to be enslaved to such a master is glorious, glorious...