The Prime Number Model of Progress in the Visual Arts

Well, this is going to be a philosophy-for-poets sort of a post.

Just so I myself don't forget, I'm working (not very fast) on 1. two more posts about edges and edge-detection, one of which is basically just a long reply to Chris's comment on the last post and 2. two more posts about the depiction of eyes. One requires some art-historical research, and the other requires finding a bunch of images that are tough to find.

Down to business. Consider this: we can't help agonizing about whether we are doing something "new" in art. Well, mostly, we're not. Imagine being the first guy to contrast blue and orange in a picture! Wow - that must have been one hell of a thing, and that guy was probably very pleased with his genius, and his friends probably bought him dinner until he got to be all insufferable about his own awesomeness. Then he had to top himself. So what does he do? Violet and yellow!

step to this

That guy's friends resign themselves to Mr. Artistic Genius having done it again. Nobody has ever thought of this before! And when they get tired of his attitude, what stunt does he pull next? He invents Christmas, that's what he does:

...and then he lives happily ever after, because who could hate Christmas?

But now all the juxtapositions of complementary colors have been discovered. Nobody will ever again be the first person to juxtapose the big six complementary colors. So art moves on. Some other new thing is required, if new things are what we seek.

In the history of art so far, there is a finite list of discoveries of absolutely fundamental new things. Complementary color. Value. Line. Shape. The figure. The still life. The landscape. Narrative scene-making. Perspective. Anatomy. Psychology.

Notice that these discoveries gradually become more complex. The simple ones come first, the tricky ones emerge once the simple ones are available and mastered.

Now let's look at prime numbers. For those of you who have forgotten, those are the integers evenly divisible only by 1 and themselves. Of the first 100 integers, 25 are prime numbers:

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97

By gentleman's agreement, 1 is excluded from this list.

I am a dirty monotheist.

If you look closely, though, you'll notice that the density of prime numbers falls across this interval. Of the first ten integers, four are primes. Of the ten integers between 91 and 100, one is a prime. Two properties of the distribution of primes across the integers have been proven:

1. Primes are infinite in number.
2. Primes continue to get scarcer.

How to predict the locations of large primes in the vast universe of integers has occupied the brains of some unusually clever mathematicians, leading to formulations like this:

scary!

And this:

scarier!

And yet for all this cleverness, nobody has found a road map to the large and increasingly rare primes. Computers still find big ones, but even when they do, these elusive leviathans take a while to prove their bona fides. For instance, this is a prime number:

648621027630345·2²⁵³⁸²⁴-1

It is the second largest known Sophie Germain prime, discovered in 2009. All ye need to know, and this you figured out for yourself, is that it lacks the grace and intuitive clarity of your 3, your 5, or your 7.

You can see where I'm going with this. I'm proposing that new, genuinely new, things in art are like the primes. There were a lot of them at the beginning. But they get rarer over time; rarer, and less intuitively beautiful. We will never run out of them, but increasingly, it will take centuries, and then millenia, to discover them. After all, we cannot assign a computer to the problem of innovation in art, because art is an artifact of the interaction of the soul and the universe. Every new discovery will demand a larger number of artists broken on the wheel of fruitless effort. Not just lousy artists either; geniuses, who had they been lucky enough to be born earlier, would have discovered the juxtaposition of complementary colors.

This presents a quandary to the artist. What should he attempt to accomplish? We have discovered so many fundamental things about art, art-primes if you like, that each art-prime is like a village, or a city. Each has a community of artists devoted to it, who live in the comfort of its fire, which is not a new fire, but has neither ceased to shed heat and light. Moreover, there are roads between these art-prime cities, well-traveled roads of familiar composites. Just as 10 is the composite product of two primes, 2 and 5, so your average Matisse or Picasso is a composite of two art-primes, line and color.

It is enough to live on these cities and to travel these roads. Our current art culture places a very high value on discovery of new art-primes, but they are rarely to be had, and many loudly-hailed discoveries turn out to be composites, or nullities. Many artists set out on the path of discovery, but few are rewarded.

My belief, in fact, is that the next art-prime will be discovered by someone who isn't looking for it. That's how it goes in human affairs. Do you think Proust sat down and said, "I'm going to invent Proust On Time?" I don't think so. I think he had a good idea, maybe he thought it was even a new idea, but I don't think he thought it was a New Idea. So he started writing, and when he got done, he said, "Well, that's a hell of a thing." And then he died.

So it will go in the visual arts. Some hard-working resident of a city of the known will strike out in a slightly new direction; he will not conceive it as a totally new direction, just something a little different to try, to set himself apart from the crowd, or to respond to that inner drive which is how most people think of art. And when he gets done, he will have changed the world, and made it larger and more glorious. But his innovation will not be so clear and beautiful as the complementary colors. It will not have the intuitive unity of a 2; it will be the artistic equivalent of a large and incomprehensible Sophie Germain prime. It will take many years for other artists to understand what this one accidental innovator has accomplished.

Now that I've written it out, I suppose this is a very dark view of innovation in the visual arts. But we are not young, as artists, any longer. If we continue to pursue the visual arts, we will either grow more mature and more comprehensive, or we will find some unanticipated way to reset the clock and become like children again.

For my part, I have painted this, and it is getting a little bit of attention as part of an art fair I am participating in this week:

Red, 60"x36", oil on canvas, 2009

A note on methodology: one of the things I like most about science and math is that it provides just wonderful similes for things in the humanities. In this respect, science and math are like the Bible. What could more perfectly capture how it is tough to enter, and tough to leave, a close relationship, than the concept of the Coulomb barrier? At the same time, while such similes are marvelous, they should not be mistaken for metaphors or identities. One thing is not the other thing. I cannot abide people who think that quantum mechanics "proves" Zen buddhism. Some things are structurally similar to other things, so that if you understand the structure of one, you can understand what is meant by comparing it with the other. This is the full extent of what I mean when I say that progress in the visual arts is like the series of prime numbers.

Wit

First, let me apologize for being a lousy blogger.

Second, let me apologize for a post only tangentially related to art. But this seems important to me. Trust me, there's a point to this.

A little background: fans of the movie Alien tend to be fans of the movie Predator as well. Alien involves insectoid parasitic aliens which, on the whole, display the level of intelligence of a ferocious animal:

your basic alien

Predator involves vaguely rasta-looking crustacean-like aliens with a level of technology somewhat more advanced than that of humans. Unlike humans, the predators (or at least the ones we meet) all have an obsession with big-game hunting that makes Teddy Roosevelt look like Francis of Assisi. The big game in question is, naturally, humans:

My interests include Bob Marley, reasoning, and ripping the spines out of humans.

Now, fans of the aliens and the predators spent several decades hoping to finally see a movie where the predators fight the aliens. And this movie was released, to much hoopla in the relevant community, in 2004. In an unexpected twist, it was called Alien Versus Predator, or, for the reading-challenged, AVP:


Let me jump tracks a little bit. Last year, the Star Trek movies were "rebooted" with a movie called, oddly, Star Trek, but which might as well have been called Star Trek Begins. It was another origin story, following the familiar characters as young hotties in space-hero school and on their first mission. Anton Yelchin played Ensign Pavel Chekov:

the new guy is on the left

Yelchin is directed to really play up Chekov's Russian accent for laughs, which gives us words like Wictor, Wulcan, and inwisible throughout the movie.

All of this is set-up for a joke.

The other evening, I was hanging out with my friend Ehren Gresehover, who is by all accounts a pretty funny guy. We were talking about some educational organization called AWP. I asked him what AWP stands for. He scrunched up his face for a second, and then broke into a broad trouble-making grin and said, in his best Chekov accent, "Alien Wersus Predator."

I burst out laughing.

This joke was funny, but more apropos of my interest here, it was witty. I've been thinking a little bit about what I mean by that, by thinking of a comment as witty. As usual, I have done next to no reading on the topic (if there's one thing I can't stand reading, it's essays of the very genres I tend to write essays in myself - what could be more boring than people thinking things over?). My conclusion was this: wit depends on the following sequence of events:

1. A provoking stimulus is offered.
2. A wide-ranging, nearly instantaneous survey is made of connections of the stimulus to other applicable data.
3. A synthesis is performed involving at least two broadly disparate data points. The synthesis is offered in the form of the witty comment.

The synthesis has the quality not only of bringing two or more apparently-unrelated or obscurely-related data points into play, but of being a formulation which highlights the absurdity or incongruity of the synthesis itself. If possible, the synthesis also sheds unexpected light on the stimulus topic, so that at the same time as absurdity is deployed, so too does an insight emerge.

In about 0.78 seconds Ehren made the leap from AWP to the iconic letters AVP, and from there justified the substitution of the V with a W by means of reference to a second shared bit of geek movie history in the same pop-scifi genre; and spit out a formulation that mocked the excessive use of acronyms by bureaucratic organizations.

Wit is hard as hell. And perhaps the hardest thing about it is step 2. Wit is extremely time-dependent. You can't come up with a witty comment slowly. Part of what makes it witty is that it's fast. Oscar Wilde was said to be fast. Salman Rushdie is said to be fast. Ehren Gresehover is fast.

While a joke might make us laugh, wit tends to inspire awe, envy, and admiration. Why? Because the qualities it evinces are qualities which we already accept as strongly applicable to good thinking in general: an enormous storehouse of remembered information on many topics, the ability to access it, and the ability to make unexpected connections within it that synthesize a new and distinct information-entity that has an insight-value which did not exist in the raw background information. So wit, in a sense, is an index of mental virtue.

Wit is relevant to art because an examination of wit points up the structure of this underlying virtue. In art we are sometimes unconstrained by time. Oscar Wilde, after all, can compose The Importance of Being Earnest as slowly as he pleases. But the benefit of this lack of time-restriction is likely less important than you would think. Most of his best jokes in that play probably emerged as rapidly as he would have spoken them. Time allowed him to polish and to revise, but to create in the first place, he had to be in the witty zone - and you cannot get in that zone without being witty in the first place.

Nonetheless, time helps, especially if you're not particularly witty. Let me give you a full disclaimer: I'm not a very witty guy myself. But I am always chasing after the underlying mental virtues which wit brings to the fore. And this applies to my art as much as to anything else. I have made, and continue to make, a broad study of other paintings and drawings. I also watch people closely and try to remember the interesting or distinctive things they do. And a million other bits of data gathering...

The ardent painter will not study the techniques of painting alone. He or she will study the history of art, the history of literature, and life in general, and will train him or herself in memory and memory-access. He or she will practice synthesis. Without this multi-step skill, a painting can have deep emotion, it can have originality - but it cannot have a willfully dense idea-matrix.

Sometimes the idea-matrix opposes deep emotion. But wit is graceful, it looks effortless. This opposition, of idea to emotion, is a function of lack of skill. Ideally, one reaches to a state of integrating these elements without thinking about it because that is what a mastered skill is: you can stop thinking about it. When you essay an effort in the field, you just apply the mastered skill autonomically.

So I hope you can understand the applicability of wit to the problem of making art. Wit is a sign-post; it is a handy reference point. It reminds us of an important principle in becoming a kind of all-encompassing artist. We aren't functioning under the short deadline of wit. In fact, we have years if need be. But the skills that produce wit are the same skills that produce conceptually-dense painting. They are worth pursuing, I think.

Let's Talk About Necks

After all, one of our most faithful readers is a nosferatu anyway.

Before I get to necks directly, let me share with you a really smart thing my wife Charlotte once said to me. This was a few years ago, when I was deep in the midst of getting up and running with getting paintings to look like things at all. Think about what the beginning oil painter faces. On the one hand, there is the world. On the other hand, there is a viscous fluid to be applied to a surface, and then pushed around perhaps, by means of bundles of hair. And this ridiculous procedure is meant to produce a configuration of pigment which resembles something in the world! Outrageous! When I began, I thought of oil paints as being like the chariot of the sun: unimaginably powerful, and nearly impossible to control. And I still think of them like that. What sublime color and richness of tone! And what a nightmarish goal, to coordinate their willful movement into something with grace, with resemblance...

So anyhow, I was working on a painting, and I said something like, "I would like to get the hands right on this one." And clever Charlotte said, "What you should do is get everything right." And I said, "What means this - this strange idea of getting everything right?" And she said, "You can't settle for doing a good job in one spot, and letting the rest of it be a mess. Every part of it should work. It should be perfect."

Now, if Steve Wright is reading this, Steve, I know you hate the idea of "perfect." So you can just go ahead and substitute "works" for "perfect." It means the same thing in this context. At that time, I was accepting that parts of my paintings did not work:

The Burning of the City I, oil on canvas, 2005-6

And after that, I didn't. I redoubled my efforts and made sure that everything, to the greatest extent I could make it work, worked. Which brings us to necks.

Necks are up there with the muscles of the upper back and shoulders among the parts of the body with the most complex visible structures. The surface appearance of the neck is the outcome of several complicated layers of muscle, as well as fat, certain cartilaginous structures, the mind-bogglingly stupid hyoid bone, and not a few blood vessels.

These structures are complex, and worse, they are in constant flux. The multiple layers of small muscles move in response to breathing, jaw tension and movement, and the micro-positioning of the head; and these factors in turn vary not only because of issues of position, action, and fatigue, but because of emotions and thoughts. A person's neck, no less than their forehead, responds minutely to what they are feeling and thinking.

The upshot of this complexity is that a great many artists who are, overall, very good at depicting the human figure, just completely screw up the neck. And it's not necessarily an obvious problem; rather, they deploy a generic depiction which reads as "good enough" to the eye. But this is the "good enough" against which Charlotte warns. The complete figure in the painting should have a neck that is not just believable, but that is theirs, in all of its subtlety and emotive power (if you don't think you see necks as emotive, trust me, you do, you just don't register it consciously; it's one of those weird things that works like that).

Now, am I going to offer an example of this failure of the neck from some living painter who is considered good at figurative painting? Hell no. I'm a working artist - I might have to be friendly with these people later. I'll burn my bridges when I get to them.

Fortunately for us, I do have an example to share with you. I am happy to be friends with Sarah Boardman, a painter and adventurer living in Colorado. She has been doing some lovely black-and-white portraits lately which she generously offers as sacrificial lambs for this post. Here's the first portrait:

Grey Day Into Light, 2010

Now, this is a rapidly sketched-out piece that happened in a burst of inspiration. Every artist hopes for days like these, when you just move into the zone and the necessary thing pours out of you. The subtle emotion of the face, the distribution of tones across the canvas - all are beautiful. But take a look at that neck. The main structures are sketched in, but once you start to think about it, they're not really convincing. The head doesn't rest on them; they do not turn quite properly with the rotation of the head. The neck is in shadow, but that's no reason for the few visible details not to work. And these do not work. It drove Sarah nuts when she realized the flaw.

Displaying what I think is commendable discipline, Sarah didn't fix it: despite the neck, the painting works. Overworking a fundamental flaw would have ruined it, so she gritted her teeth and let it go. She moved on to this painting, executed in a similar state of carefree inevitability, of painting in the zone:

Ambiguity, 2010

You see that? Now the neck works. The folds caused by its rotation are present, the play of light across the laryngeal structures is accurate, and it contributes to our understanding of the person painted. How?

The neck is not tensed. So despite the ambivalence of the facial expression, we subliminally understand that the subject is not preparing for a fight-or-flight response. And this makes her vulnerable in a way that the face alone cannot convey. What we are allowed to see here is a private and solitary moment of doubt - or a moment of doubt in the company of somebody who is absolutely trusted; the expression makes the painting sincere - but the neck makes the painting intimate. That's what a neck that works can add to a painting.

Let's assume for a second that I've convinced you of the importance of a well-observed neck. So, you say, how am I supposed to learn this tao of necks? Well, there's never any magic trick, so I would answer, as ever, the hard way:

Superficial muscles of the neck


Deeper muscles of the neck

Those are studies I did from cadaver dissections. As with all of my anatomical work, I don't consciously think about this stuff every time I draw or paint a person. Rather, I have become intuitively familiar with the anatomy and with the typical behaviors of the anatomy, so that I can organize the chaos of sensory data into a coherent schema when I am working.

But structure alone is insufficient for a true rendering of the neck. Remember the other key component - the response of the neck to emotion and thought. There is only a hard way for learning to depict this as well: you just have to watch people intently for a long time, and really think about what you're seeing. And eventually, you'll learn. I'm not writing this from any sense of lofty accomplishment. I'm not done with this process of learning, I never can be. It's just that this method of careful and ongoing observation and practice is the only one I've ever stumbled on that has allowed me to make any progress at all...

But the first step is to become aware of the neck as a pivotal component of a good depiction of a person. That said, let's take a look at a few really impressive necks:

Caravaggio, of course. Here we have two emotionally impressive necks. Notice the striation of raised fibers at the base of Christ's neck. The muscles here (don't ask me the names; I never learn the names of anything) are tense. Because he's in an unnatural position and because he's in pain.

Expressing an entirely different emotion, the muscles in the neck of the flagellator on the left are also tensed. This is a response to the motion and tension of his jaw and shoulders - this pattern of tension is the tension of aggression. You might never think about these cords of muscle, standing out from the neck, but you will definitely integrate them into your understanding of the dynamics of the scene.

Now let's take a look at Parmigianino's Madonna of the Long Neck:

Awooga! That is a long neck! Notice that Parmigianino has balanced two opposed necessities in his depiction: forms are defined at the base, indicating that the neck is, indeed, supporting the head. And yet the upper part of the neck is more purely columnar, suggesting a state of muscular relaxation - of serenity. The unusual length is involved with Parmigianino's Mannerism, Mannerism being a school of art involving getting so awesome at anatomy that you can blatantly screw around with it and still make your figures work.

Go to Barnes and Noble

Hello, happy few! Let me share this with you:

Maidman, you say, what is this?

Allow me to answer in several parts:

Background: a quilted wall-hanging Charlotte made for me, using the loose "rooftop pattern" pioneered by the quilting savants of Gee's Bend.
Middle ground: me, painting.
Forward middle ground: a painting.
Foreground: Leah, the subject of a painting.
Context: printed in the "about the artist" section of my article in the April-May issue of International Artist.
Additional consideration: They put another picture of me working on the cover of the magazine.
Conclusion: Go to Barnes and Noble and buy yourself a copy.

My piece is on page 80. It's got a bunch of my paintings and some more of that deathless prose you've grown to tolerate. I hope you like it! And if you've got any questions or comments, don't hesitate to let me know and I'll try to answer.

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.