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...

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.