Edges and Edge Detection Part 1: Neurology

Well, it's been too long since I've developed an idea that struck me while reading Margaret Livingstone's Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing. But I've been mulling over the concept of edges, from which the concept of line arises. This is one of the fundamental tools of art, and well worth thinking about a little more.

How do we see edges? As always, the brain avoids using high-level structures for brute information processing of the visual field. You might think, well, receptor cells in the eye respond to light, firing a signal when they are exposed to light and failing to fire a signal when they are exposed to darkness:


That's what you would think, my friend, but you would be leaving most of the story woefully untold. Yes, these cells exist. But it seems that this fairly obvious scheme is not cool enough for the brain. So the raw "light/dark" cells feed this information, while in the eye, to ganglion cells that show center/surround signal processing. Instead of a binary ON for "I'm lit" and a binary OFF for "I'm not lit," they respond to their little flock of receptor cells to produce a continuum of signals (actually, a continuum of frequencies of firing). The simplest scenarios are as follows. The bottom two "high frequency" responses represent, I'm pretty sure, the optimum firing conditions for two different types of center/surround cell, both of which show the first two responses in totally lit and totally unlit conditions:



Keep in mind that we're talking about black and white processing here. We'll get back to that.

But consider this scenario:


That's a classic edge - a sharp contrast over a short region. And the cell is equipped to produce a signal frequency between "medium frequency" and "high frequency" in response.

How does the brain take advantage of all this fancy information that's getting processed in the eye? Well, a couple of Livingstone's colleagues in the Department of Extreme Cleverness, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, figured out that these center/surround ganglion cells are feeding their information to cells in the brain that are equipped to compare signals from adjacent ganglion cells. And these higher-level processors show orientation. Several different specialized cells, which are at the point of detecting edges, are wired to each cluster of lower-level center/surround cells, and they fire when the cluster, as a composite, matches their specialized detection function:
On the left are the center/surround ganglia. On the right are the edge detector cells in the brain. Shaded cells are busy firing.

From there, you're off to the races. Further specialization and processing allows detection of continuous edges, broken edges, curved edges, corners, etc. And finally, you have an image that you're conscious of.

What's important to take away here is that, even though you are not aware of it, deeply embedded in your visual perception of the world are these low-level edge data, which are cognitively close to line data. Lines are deeply embedded in your sense of sight. This is a big part of the reason that when you see a line drawing...


...you see a comprehensible visual field, even though virtually all of what you intuitively think of as information in the visual field is missing. The defining characteristics of a critical part of that visual field are present.

This is also why the figure/ground distinction exists in reality even though it does not exist in the raw visual field. The brain never sees the raw visual field. It only becomes aware of the neurologically-processed visual field, into which the edge phenomenon has been encoded.

Now, lots of interesting artistic results arise from all this, and the next few posts will build up a discussion of it. For the time being, let me just say, the same center/edge processing exists in color, but it's lower resolution. This is a big part of the reason that Degas died thinking of himself as a failure. His grand project was to unite the artistic phenomena of color and line. He never thought he found that unity, despite his gorgeous attempts:


Why? Because the line he intuitively recognized as Line is achromatic. It cannot be unified with color. Which is not to say that Degas's attempt was a waste of time. Just look at what he accomplished by pursuing an impossible goal.

A couple notes:

1. Doing all those diagrams in Photoshop? Total pain. Not recommended.
2. I think I'm screwing up the real model of processing as presented by Livingstone. The thematic fundamentals are correct, but I can't vouch for my having related every step of the way correctly. Just read her book, it's awesome.

Holy Moly I'm Bad At That

I forgot to mention - the February/March issue of International Artist is on newsstands, and it's got the first of my four articles on working with models. The publisher did a beautiful job on layout and reproduction, showcasing this painting, this one, and a few I'm working on now. So run out and buy a copy! Or a painting...

As long as I've got your attention, let me post a couple drawings of Piera from yesterday. This continues my try-new-ideas project. My new idea this time was to use white and red pencil on rough black paper.

Well, new idea for me; other people have actually thought of doing this before.

What was interesting about the experience was that you basically can't erase and can't put down preparatory marks that aren't prominent in the final piece. So it reduces to the same situation as working in pen: you live with your mistakes, and you make your mistakes a virtue. I thought the draughtsmanship turned out a little cruder than usual, but this, combined with the tendency of the medium toward having a really nice sense of mass, gave the efforts a sense of emotional solidity which I found very satisfying. Your mileage may vary.

We're not computers, Sebastian. We're physical.

One of Rutger Hauer's startling number of immortal lines in Blade Runner.


I remembered it the other day while chatting with Adam Miller. He was talking about the surprising feel for painting he encounters sometimes when teaching older women. It wasn't a generalized feel for painting; it was a rapid understanding of how to handle the problem of getting paint onto canvas well.

He speculated that the demographic-specific aptitude results from the physicality of painting. Which is to say, you need to be sensitive to a physical process that you execute through dexterity of the hand. The older women tended to have experience with cooking, mending, and crafts. They had muscle memory of subtly shaping materials by hand in service to an idea.

This quality of painting is easy to forget. The casual viewer can easily confuse figurative painting with photography - not so much thinking that they look the same, but that they arise from similarly vague or abstract procedures. This is not so.

Paint must be coaxed onto a canvas. You can do it rapidly or slowly, thickly or thinly. But you cannot do it automatically. You have to figure out the physical properties of the highly viscous fluid and how it interacts with brush and surface.

Because I hate schooling, I figured it out on my own. I would take a pad of primed canvas sheets, some brushes, and tubes of white and burnt sienna with me to life drawing twice a week from 2001 to 2004. It often struck me as ridiculous, trying to make an image in an archaic way, by shoving colored substances around on a surface. Once I stopped shoving, I started getting it right. It took me those three years to learn the rudiments of the sensitivity and dexterity of hand, and to be able to guess what paint would do as I applied it to the surface.

Then I had to learn the properties of the colors. I spent a few months on cadmium red. French ultramarine. Burnt umber. Yellow ochre. Not just the way they mix, or their relative strengths - but their characteristic consistencies. How to move them around on the surface until they went where I wanted, as I wanted. When my friend James realized that paint is not the same as the photographic emulsion, which takes care of all that color business, he was shocked - it sounded like alchemy to him.

By nature, I do not particularly like to draw attention to the physical substrate of the image. This attitude isn't right or wrong - Steve Wright is producing amazing work from the opposite perspective: he likes you to know that the paint is physical.


His paint is dazzlingly thick, and the brushstrokes are clear and distinct. My own paint is nearly as thin as watercolor, and you can rarely see a brushstroke. Both processes, however, result from a process of learning, not only to see, and interpret, and make aesthetic decisions, but to pour the outcome of all of that into a physical process that feeds back into the more abstract functions and informs them as well.

When I screw up, I still sometimes instinctively crab my hand to hit Apple-Z. But it's not there; paint is physical.

Against Authenticity

"Authenticity" is a fairly generally-lauded value in art making. I have philosophical and personal reasons to oppose it. The philosophical ones very likely arise from the personal ones, as a means of self-justification, or simply because I have a surprising and specific experience with authenticity. So let me explain the personal issue first.

Everybody has a natural line. This could also be called an authentic line. It is the line that spontaneously emerges as the most uncensored line an artist can produce in the freest, fastest drawing they can do. Some artists have extremely distinctive and recognizable natural lines. Egon Schiele comes to mind, with his knobby junctures and jagged delineation of edge:


So does Domenico Tiepolo, with his bewitchingly weird wobbliness:


Others you might want to think about are Albrecht Durer, with his tense, cramped line:


...and Boticelli, with his graceful, sweeping line:


I think that, whatever modifications these artists have imposed on their natural line, a sense of their natural line comes through. These artists are in the marvelous position of having natural lines which are original and pleasing - their authenticity of expression is extremely delightful and, moreover, contributes to a new understanding of the capabilities of art.

I have a natural line, an authentic line, as well. I've had this line since I was five or six years old. I'm pretty convinced there's a genetic basis for it, and for all natural line. But there's a severe problem with mine - somebody else took it first.

The drawings of mine below are from a drawing session with Piera on December 30, 2009. She's pregnant, and can't work around oil paints and their associated toxins right now, so I'm doing a bunch of drawings and watercolors and whatnot, just playing around and experimenting, until she has her baby. I decided to do some drawings using my natural line; over the course of an hour, I drew 12.

Here's one of the drawings from that session:


And here's one that's too similar for comfort:



Yes, that's Henri Matisse.

The resemblance is not precise, but it's close enough that my authentic line looks derivative. And let me add that there are few things more fun for me than using my authentic line. Let's look at a few more drawings:


Moi.

Henri.

I should point out that I wasn't copying the Matisse drawings I'm including here - I found these post facto with a google search.


Aussi moi.

Aussi Henri.

Well, that's a bummer, isn't it! My authentic line looks completely inauthentic - it looks like an accomplished put-on.

Oh well. Here's how I dealt with the problem: when I was first becoming self-aware as an artist, this whole idea of authenticity didn't really exist in my universe. I just thought I was drawing badly! Because what I wanted was to draw a much more detailed, proportional, and harmonious image. I wanted to draw like Da Vinci. And I spent, what, ten or fifteen years figuring out how to draw? So now I have a way that I tend to draw which I also like very much:


It's not Da Vinci, but what is? I retraced the steps that Da Vinci took to learn to draw - life drawing and anatomical dissection, and above all, constant practice. So I think of it as time well spent.

That's my personal problem with the concept of authenticity.

Let me expand the argument to a general problem with the concept of authenticity. To do that, let's take a brief look at the justification that authenticity-proponents offer for its value.

The stated link between authenticity and merit is that art, being an emotionally expressive medium, is at its best when the line between impulse and work is as short as possible. The premise is that all people have something worthwhile to express. When that expression is unmediated, a true form emerges - an authentic form.

The unstated link between authenticity and merit is that it provides an algorithmic method for determining what we think of art. If an artist from Pasadena paints suburbs - that's authentic. If an artist from Ghana paints traditional tribal patterns - that's authentic. A simple comparison of the biography of the artist with the content and style of the art provides a linear metric for quality.

As far as I can tell, these are the two major arguments for authenticity. Let me attack the second argument first.

This algorithmic method of determining the "validity," and hence the "quality," of art, is yet another attempt to avoid the fundamental problem with forming an opinion of art. What is required in forming an opinion is taste. Developing taste and taking the responsibility for assertions of taste are insanely difficult and potentially humiliating tasks. People like to be told what to think of things. At its simplest, the biographical-authenticity argument is a quick method for providing an opinion without forcing the viewer to come to his or her own conclusion. It appeals to the fear we all have when looking at unknown art and asking ourselves, "Should I like it?"

It is also attended by a host of post-modernist argumentation. All of this argumentation revolves around a specific form of the general dehumanizing intent of post-modernism. The specific form is the denial of the human capacity for imagination. Which is to say, the post-modern argument is that any expression that does not arise directly from and address directly the personal (or, more particularly, demographic-ethnic) experience of the artist is inauthentic and hence, for various reasons, invalid. Anybody who denies the validity of imagination consequently denies the ability of art to communicate, and therefore is not only wrong, but has no pertinence to my project.

The first argument, the stated one about shortening the link between emotion and expression, is more interesting. Yes, art is emotionally expressive. Yes, true emotion is absolutely fundamental to sincere art. Yes, sincere art is the basis for good art. And yet - I cannot buy the Romantic overtone of the argument. Let me turn to Wordsworth's famous preface to the lyrical ballads. Famous? you say. I've never heard of it.

Sure you have. Here's the famous part:

For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings...

Here's the not-so-famous follow-up. Well, he has two follow-ups in two different parts of the preface. The second is better known:

...it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity

The first is more complete:

...and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important subjects, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such a nature, and in such connexion with each other, that the understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified.

Whoa! Now there is a strong argument for artifice.

I am reminded of two other comments on the subject - somewhere (I can't remember where), Nietzsche denigrates art as a sort of second-hand emotionalism, because anyone who felt a real first-hand emotion would be able to do nothing more than scream. Or something like that.

And Proust, in the final chapters of his book, concludes that his writing involves the transmogrification of the raw material of memory into a kind of artistic form or image which redeems and reclaims the lost past, fixing it and allowing, not the past, but the art, to be possessed. Hence the name of the volume, Le Temps retrouvé, generally translated as Time Regained.

What this means for the practical artist is that the locus of necessary authenticity lies not in method, but in source. Successful authentic method - that is, originality of method in addition to emotional or cognitive authenticity of the method - is, like love, nice work if you can get it. But it's a crapshoot of genetics and art history if you can get that kind of work. So it is good to remember that art, methodologically, is artifice. Art is making one thing, generally pigments mixed with a medium of some sort, look like something else, generally (in my case) naked ladies. So it's good not to get too hung up on authenticity of method, since the materials by means of which the method is executed are totally false to begin with.

The title of this post is a little bit of a falsely provocative choice. Of course I believe in authenticity. But the place where I believe authenticity is most important (and remember, after all, I have to) is in the inspiration and vision which the method serves. Find some true thing that you must transmit from yourself into the world, and use whatever works to give it a body.

Since I started writing this post, I've worked with Piera some more. I figured that since I can't help the Matisse effect, I might as well steal his best tricks. In the pieces below, I've drawn on top of colored-paper cutouts glued onto heavy white watercolor paper.





P.S. I apologize for hitting "post" before finishing uploading images. My bad. Fixed now.

We have guests!

Well, Pengo, Chris, April, Greg - we've got some guests today. My work is posted right now at www.artistaday.com, and this seems to be driving 1.2 metric buttloads of traffic to my site, and a little overflow to here. So our cozy little conversation about art and artists is much more public today. Welcome, guests, and I hope you enjoy! And longtime readers - I apologize again for not posting more. It takes a lot of thought to cook these things up! But I've got a few things to tell you in the next several days, especially about my problematic relationship with Matisse. More soon.

Oh, and here's a painting I finished yesterday. As usual, the background took forever to get around to. The figure and the first layer of the background were finished by September.

Wu

In his novel The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick mentions a concept, wu, which has stuck with me for years now. Preparing for this post, I did a perfunctory bit of internet research, and it seems that Dick likely made up this concept and name himself.

In the novel, a character designs jewelry or something like that, in an alternate America occupied by the victorious Japanese and Germans. A Japanese officer, or somebody like that, sees his designs, and says, these have wu. He explains that wu is a quality of intense itself-ness about an object. There is such an absence of divergence between what the object is and how the object seems, that to study the object is an opportunity to reach a kind of enlightenment about the nature of being.

The concept of wu is very appealing, as you can see, and can be applied to many things. Some chairs have wu; others do not have wu. A beautifully designed industrial object, following perfectly the form-follows-function principle, can often be said to have wu. A ceramic bowl of just the right width, depth, and texture, is a prime candidate for wu.

The concept of wu, of vivid itself-ness, is a forceful concept for still-life painters. The struggle to elucidate the soulfulness of objects starts with grasping the itself-ness of objects. For most still-lives to have life, they must first have wu.

David Hockney, in his extremely uneven book on the so-called secret knowledge of the masters, compares the still-life apples of Caravaggio and the still-life apples of Cezanne. He describes the unsatisfying quality of Caravaggio's apples in terms of how they "read at a distance" compared with Cezanne's apples:

Caravaggio

Cezanne

This is a technical approach, and a useful one, but to me the important difference is conceptual - the difference is that Caravaggio's apples do not have wu, and Cezanne's do. Caravaggio's apples are beautifully, even obsessively, rendered. Every detail is perfect. But they remain in the realm of seeming. Cezanne's apples, blunt, simple, solid, move past the realm of seeming to the realm of being. They have wu.

A modern painter (about whom I will have more to say, eventually, in my discussion of object edges) who has followed in Cezanne's path is Giorgio Morandi. I had the good fortune to see an exhibit of Morandi's paintings at the Met last year, where I was dazzled by his still-lives of bottles, paintings like this:

These paintings, like Cezanne's, show amazingly crude brushwork up close. From a distance, they slip into perfection, perfect solidity and presence.

Sadly, this degree of wu seems to be almost unavailable to the more technical painter. Many objects can be painted beautifully by masterful painters, but they tend to lack that itself-ness, that necessity:

From favorite whipping-boy Bouguereau, whom I will remind you I actually like. But the lemons? Kind of meh, for my money.

Sargent, who knows what he's doing, embraces the crude when the wu of the object demands it (and many other times as well):

detail of the jar from The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit

Matisse, who follows itself-ness through line rather than painted area, captures wu many times - including in painted area in his bowl of fish (visit this one if you live in Chicago, it's at the Art Institute):


Rembrandt has one of the most famous instances of wu in art history, and again, his rendering is crude. This is the celebrated gold chain that Aristotle wears in Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer:
The paint is splotched and slathered on, it's Rembrandt at his thickest.

I believe the crudity of depiction is deeply linked to wu. There is a way that fine depiction distracts the mind from the essence of the thing. Too much naturalistic verisimilitude cheapens the experience of the thing; it clutters up the perception with virtuosity, and seeming-ness. To reach wu, one must strip away the properties of seeming and seek the properties of is-ness.

Study this paper lantern in a Stephen Wright painting:


That lantern, with its shadows and its rip, is very crudely handled at the level of paint. And it is rich in wu. It could be nothing but itself; its intense itself-ness relieves us of distraction, of hazy vision and hazy understanding - it brings us into confrontation with an unadulterated quality of being which goes on to infect our perception of whatever we look at afterward. This humble paper lantern purifies us.

Now this all popped into my head because Charlotte, my wife, is no big fan of nudes. Which is to say, she likes them alright, but if you wanted to give her a painting for Christmas, say, you probably wouldn't want it to be a nude. Charlotte likes things, particularly simple, natural things. So, because I wanted to paint her a painting for Christmas, I started thinking about Morandi again, and I decided to try to apply what I learned from him to the problem of a seashell I had lying around the studio (it came back with us from Italy earlier in the year). This is what I came up with:


I was very pleased with this! I do paint things aside from naked ladies, but I've never been very happy with them. I just didn't care all that much. This time, I felt a sense of possession of the painting, as if it were something I would have painted anyway.

Trying to evaluate why I liked it, I recalled the concept of wu, and I thought, well, maybe I have finally painted a thing in such a way as to capture wu.

Now it just so happens that my mom and her husband had sent me a Harry & David gift basket at about this time, and in this basket there were some pears. These pears were not just green - they had some red spots. And they were so goddamned beautiful that I thought, well, really, I ought to paint one of them as well. So I did, with itself-ness in mind:


This also was very pleasing! This seemed very pear-like to me. As you can see, these objects are much cruder than my figure paintings usually are. But to me, they are very satisfying. In fact, I think I will paint some more little still-lives (these are 8"x8", oil on board).

I hope I have taken the first step toward having wu in my own work.

DISCLAIMER: As always, take what I say with a huge grain of salt. Plenty of counter-examples in art abound, and this model is not meant to be complete or exclusive. Consider the skull in De La Tour's Penitent Magdalene if you want to see my argument break down.

Tools of Expression: Shadow Edges

OK, I've got one for you. Here's another one of those little-appreciated tools of expression. Well, not so much little-appreciated, as rarely-verbalized: the quality of the edges of shadows. Not cast shadows, but regions where the turning of a form takes it from lit to unlit. In this case, we will compare the arms in two of my paintings, because the comparison illustrates my point fairly clearly:
The left painting is that Emma painting I finished recently. The right painting I am working on now, with Cassandra (actually, let me throw in a plug for her fantastic dance company, Desert Sin, as long as we're talking about her).

Now, the light sources in the two paintings are actually the same - I'm using my 500-watt tungsten softbox raised on a C-stand to a height of about 7 feet. The diffusion is the same for each painting. The models have similarly lean, muscular arms. But the images, obviously, look very different.

Apart from the choices I made in terms of color and value contrast, the quality of the edge of the shadow is different in each case. For the Emma painting, I wanted to produce a sense of simplicity, starkness, and stripping down of appearances to essentials. So I made the shadow edge artificially hard and stylized. In the upper arm, much of it is virtually a straight line.

This comes across as crude, childish - but I wanted it to; I wanted to avoid the trappings of skill, which slip so easily into tricks.

For the Cassandra painting, I want a sense of light and floating. And I have allowed this to inform the shadow edge on her arm as well. This shadow edge occurs only on the forearm. I have followed the actual curve of the edge much more closely than I did in the Emma painting, and at each point along its extent, I have asked, and tried to answer, the question: how hard is this edge? Often it subsides into soft indistinctness. But sometimes it is hard, where it is near the joints of the wrist and elbow.

In cinematography, a very simple version of the dichotomy illustrated here is always addressed: is the lighting hard (as in the Emma painting) or soft (as in the Cassandra painting). The issue is rarely pushed much farther than this, because film involves coordinating so many elements that people really don't have the time to screw around with lighting as fancy as the resolution limits of film allow.

In painting, there is much less to worry about, and painting isn't photographic anyway. There's plenty of time to resolve and stylize the most sophisticated analysis of the hard/soft distinction over every part of the painting (if you go back and look at the Emma painting, you'll see it's not hard everywhere). Be that as it may, the edges of shadows are powerful expressive tools, and one ought always to consider how the depiction of these edges integrates aesthetically and thematically with the painting overall.

Let Me Phrase That Better

My critique of the Impressionists in the post below got kind of out of control. I meant to sum it up clearly. I'll try to do that now.

Impressionist: Armed with the insights of modern science, I am going to depict the figure/ground phenomenon as we really perceive it, stripped of hoary aesthetic considerations. I will conduct a scientific inquiry into the nature of sight.

Neuroscientist: Actually, you're 0 for 1 on that, Georges.

Impressionist: Sacrebleu! How come?

Neuroscientist: Because what you're doing isn't science. What made you think that a painting is a controlled experiment?

Impressionist: Uh... le scientisme?

Neuroscientist: Bingo.

To be fair, the undifferentiated visual field of the Impressionists does provide scientists with very interesting material - but the material has to do with analyzing how we build up an undifferentiated field into a coherent image, and not with any kind of "scientific relevation" that what we really see is an undifferentiated field. So the Impressionists kind of hilariously flame out on their stated intention, but wind up being useful to scientists anyway.

The moral for artists remains that you should put art first, science second.

Figure and Ground

Chris asks:

Do you normally think of the background at the same time as your subject? Do you consider the background to be the same thing as your subject? I would gather it is a pretty important part of the Mona Lisa, but I wonder if any of it came as an afterthought.

He's talking about Emma Twice. This is an interesting question, and it varies by artist, and even within an artist's work. I started out not considering the background when I started, but it led to too many compositional problems over time, so now I'm pretty careful to have a good idea of how the figure fits into a complete composition before I begin. Let's compare a painting with a similar background that I did before I adopted this approach, with Emma Twice. Here's the very old painting - I did the figure part in early 2006, and the background in late 2006:

I chose this one, On the Stairs, as an example of a "good save." I had a general idea about light and color, but not anything specific. So I had to cook something up after I had completed the figure. It's a lousy approach, I think, because you are likely going to sacrifice overall unity in your drive to just go ahead and start painting a figure you're excited about. Now let's look at Emma Twice again:
To me, this reads as much more coherent as a complete painting. You never anticipate everything, but you can anticipate a lot. For instance, here's how this painting came about: I thought of doing a painting of Emma, who is a delightful model to work with. Then I thought of the color. Then I thought of doing two of her. I initially had two different poses in mind, but they turned out to have no emotional connotation, and to be very difficult to hold. So then I came up with these poses and this mood. And then I had the idea for the stone she's sitting on and the flat wall with the value gradient across it. After that, I thought of the texturing on the wall by means of opaque and transparent paint interacting.

All of that was before I put paint to canvas.

The only part of the background that I came up with after the figures were complete, was those lines and corroded spots. That was a response to the Georgia O'Keefe show.

I hope that helps answer your question. My backgrounds tend to be somewhat detached from the figures because I'm not one of those guys that either: a) paints the figure in his studio, and puts the studio in, or b) comes up with a scene in a literal space, within which the figures are relatively less important parts.

I think of the "scenes" I paint as occurring in something I call Zero Space. That is, the figure is isolated from the world as we know the world, and rather, is lit in the final light, when everything else has been stripped away and weathered to dust. This is one of the main reasons for the nudity as well - I think of it in terms of an imaginary dictum, "It is only naked you will enter into the house of the truth."

That said, I'm not painting figures on figure-shaped canvases. I have to do something with the background. So I try to make it work with the composition overall, and at this point, I force myself to conceptualize it pretty completely before I start.

To tackle the problem from a different angle, we have here an opportunity to examine once again the weaknesses of scientism as an approach to art. First, let's clarify "scientism" a little. It turns out F.A. "Road to Serfdom" Hayek has a very good description of what I'm getting at. This is from The Counter-Revolution of Science:

It need scarcely be emphasized that nothing we shall have to say is aimed against the methods of Science in their proper sphere or is intended to throw the slightest doubt on their value. But to preclude any misunderstanding on this point we shall, wherever we are concerned not with the general spirit of disinterested inquiry but with slavish imitation of the method and language of Science, speak of “scientism” or the “scientistic” prejudice. Although these terms are not completely unknown in English, they are actually borrowed from the French, where in recent years they have come to be generally used in very much the same sense in which they will be used here. It should be noted that, in the sense in which we shall use these terms, they describe, of course, an attitude which is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed. The scientistic as distinguished from the scientific view is not an unprejudiced but a very prejudiced approach which, before it has considered its subject, claims to know what is the most appropriate way of investigating it.

I haven't read the book myself. I'm guessing he's talking about economics and the social sciences. But this problem infects the arts in the modern period as well. The example I wanted to give was that of the Impressionists in relation to the figure/ground distinction:

Seurat, in case you're wondering.

Now to my understanding, the Impressionists made a big fuss about how Modern Science had demonstrated that there is no distinction between figure and ground (background) when light strikes the retina - it's all just light. And since they were going to be very modern and truthful, they were not going to indulge in any of the classical figure/ground separation tricks in their paintings.

What they failed to recognize is that the story is never finished with science. As Livingstone and her colleagues have more recently demonstrated, this claim about a lack of figure/ground distinction may be true about the raw light, but as soon as the light strikes the retina, it is subjected to increasingly complex and powerful neurological processing mechanisms which absolutely do seek figure/ground distinctions (starting with color and value contrasts and autonomously building up to lines and shapes) so that by the time the image is consciously understood by the mind, it has fundamental and irrevocable figure/ground properties.

So what did the Impressionists accomplish with their scientistic approach to image construction? Well, hell, they made some pretty good paintings. And you could even argue that their totemistic scientism enabled them to go off on a very interesting path that would not otherwise have occurred to anybody, in regard to the figure/ground phenomenon. They also happen to have produced some real crap based on this false unification:

Ooh! Blurry edges! You'll have to forgive me, I have it in for late-period Renoir. So look - he'd have been making crappy softcore porn even without this figure/ground stuff. But the point is that the figure/ground work they did was not any kind of scientific innovation the way they thought it was. As science-following, it was not faithful to the mechanism of sight, because the mechanism of sight was poorly understood then. Hell, it's probably poorly understood now, and anyone who thinks "I'll apply science to my art" would do well to consider that current science is also not definitive.

So as science, the figure/ground formulation they applied was meaningless. They weren't scientists. Of course it made for interesting art, but it wasn't science.

Worse, this particular historical tic does not respect the actual functional relationship between science and art. Which is to say, in the best instances, the intuition of artists leads scientists to discover new things. You remember how Shakespeare's characterization of Ophelia was eventually found to be a surprisingly accurate description of some pathological state later identified specifically by psychology? The same is true with regard to art and optical neurology, although of course, optical neurology, unlike modern psychology, is a real science.

Margaret Livingstone was good enough to forward Patrick Cavanagh's The Artist as Neuroscientist (that links to a google search, the first result of which is a PDF of the article), a fascinating and easy-to-read article on contributions of art to the modern understanding of how the brain processes visual stimuli to construct coherent spaces and objects. In this article, the proper relationship prevails: artists certainly learn from science, but before they slavishly try to perform cargo-cultish "scientific investigations," they depict things based on their insight and experience of how things look. And the way they do this, absent scientism, provides fascinating material for scientists to learn what "looks real" to the brain.

But hell - the Impressionists themselves, for all their scientism, made similar contributions, which you can read about in Livingstone's book. These contributions provide strong evidence that art overcomes even the stupid ideas of artists.

Anyhow, when Chris raised the topic of figure and ground, it reminded me of this particular art historical anecdote.

Emma Twice

I finally got around to finishing the background on the Emma painting a couple days ago:

I had had something like this in mind all along, but I got more specificity, and a kick in the butt, from seeing the Georgia O'Keefe show at the Whitney over the weekend. Here's a piece that wasn't in the show, but since I couldn't find any good images of the ones in the show, it'll have to do:
What I got from O'Keefe was the idea to think seriously about the lines in that wall behind Emma as a significant compositional element. I'm glad I did, too, I don't know what I was thinking when I was like, "I'll just make some lines, it'll work out."

Optical Black: Part 4

Let's see if I can finish off this topic, shall we? The first three installments are here, here and here.

I've had a lot to say about the difference between using color to establish darkness, and using black to establish darkness. I've claimed that the black system appeals to an older part of the brain than the color system. I've claimed that the systems are immiscible. And I've claimed that you cannot express the profundity available to the black system in the color system, while you cannot express the sensuality available to the color system in the black system.

I've been thinking over what all this means and how to sum it up. And here's my conclusion: for whatever reason - very likely the scientific reason - the two systems produce (at least for me) these effects:

The color system shows how things look. The black system shows what things are.

These are the sensations I have when looking at paintings in these two systems. Obviously, Rouen Cathedral does not look like this, or this, at any time of day:

But you look at these, and you have the feeling that they catch some profoundly true thing about how this Cathedral looks in light, and air, and time. Similarly, no scene was ever this perfect, and so utterly bleached of real color:

And yet I cannot help but think, when I see this, that this is absolutely solid and real. The Monet is the epitome of appearance, and the Caravaggio the epitome of being.

Your mileage may vary.

You may remember that I claimed these two dark systems, color and black, cannot be fused because they are neurologically distinct in their effects. While I was thinking this over, I turned my mind to the possibility of exceptions to my own rule. I thought of a few candidates: Vermeer, Velazquez, and Sargent. The first two came to mind because Harold Speed claims that, among their virtues, was a panchromatic color system hundreds of years before everyone else figured it out. Let's take one more look at these guys and see what we can see.

Velazquez:

Another Velazquez:
Vermeer:
Another Vermeer:
You notice anything interesting about these paintings? All of them? Let me tell you what's interesting to me in this context. The eye, to varying degrees in each painting, is convinced that it is looking at a panchromatic system. And yet the shadows are brown or black. Speed allows that this is true - that Velazquez and Vermeer chose lighting situations which resulted in monochromatic shadows.

So this isn't truly color-dark painting at all. It is color-light painting. That makes all the difference, and this is very very interesting.

Why? Because, as painters, we discover something that looks like a fusion (though it isn't really). Go nuts with color in the light areas, but get those shadows to go colorless dark! And you will produce the impression of a full-color world, without losing the profundity of the dark-from-black system. Which brings us to John Singer Sargent.

Your impulse might be to say, Well, Maidman, Sargent works in the full spectrum. Why, I can picture a blue shadow of his right now. I don't doubt that you can. What I'm claiming is that Sargent switches back and forth between the darkness paradigms at will. When he is interested in celebrating the beauty of the world, particularly the outdoors, then he works in the panchromatic system, generally in watercolor:

Those are some blue goddamned shadows right there!

And yet, when the man wants to express something about human nature, he moves indoors, he switches to oil (or, later, charcoal), and suddenly, we're looking at darkness from brown and black:

Examine his work here - he's still working full spectrum in the lights, but the darks are dropping into monochrome. He has grasped the same principle as Velazquez and Vermeer. There is somebody else who figured this out in a very sophisticated and interesting way: Giorgio Morandi. But I'm going to discuss him in my upcoming work on edges.

Some sociology-type people would no doubt have something to say about seeming profundity coming from black-dark scenes being set indoors, not from the color system used. To them I say this:

Rubens, Prometheus Bound.

Well.

Shall we consider the case closed on optical black? At least until the suspect busts out of concept-jail once again? Because they always do.