Looking at Art

This is a guide to better seeing and understanding works of art. For a work of art to look its best it must be seen as it was seen when it was made. We have various ways of looking at the world. The particular way in which we need to see a work of art is one of these. Seeing a work in the right way is essential to its understanding and appreciation. From time to time, place to place, people to people, culture to culture, nation to nation and artist to artist ways of seeing differ. This guide describes such differences. We open our eyes and light enters through the lenses and forms pictures on our retinas. From these our brain creates the world we see, our visual world. The visual world which appears to us as an upright, stable and boundless lens projected image made up of objects and space. We are part of this world both as those parts of ourselves we can see and as a central viewing place located between the eyes which I call the visual ego. We can not see our visual ego as it does the seeing. We experience its existence by the way the world looks. The visual ego can change in size, shape, distance and orientation relative to an object that can be seen lined up with us, we with it or unaligned. The changes in our visual ego help us to understand the visual world and to get around in a physical world which differs from the one we see. For example things look small when far away. We compensate for this by reducing the size of our visual ego making a distant object seem close. This is called constancy scaling. By changing the size our visual ego we make both the large motion picture and the small television picture look life size. When the visual ego is smaller the object is seen along a line of sight stretching out from the end the ego to a point on a contour of the object. This oblique line of sight makes the object and the rest of the visual world more clearly three-dimensional. Conversely when our visual ego is larger a line of sight runs out from a point on the edge of the object to the ego. This results in a less three-dimensional object. When a line of sight is conceived of as fixed contours in the rest of the visual world are seen successively aligned with the ego. When the ego is large we are oriented to the object and when the ego is small the object appears oriented to us. An object observed to the side of the small ego is seen unaligned as is an object on the plane of the object seen to the side of the object when the ego is large. Unaligned objects appear relatively two-dimensional. All this might seem strange and new to you but it is not. These all are parts of normal vision. Things you do all the time. Becoming aware of the size, shape, position and orientation of the visual ego is all important when it comes to works of art. It is the particular use of the visual ego that holds a work of art together and makes it a work of art, a work of art being a thing made by a hunan being using the visual ego in a particular way The word perspective I use here to refer to a particular use of the visual ego. The way a work of art looks depends on the perspective used in its making. When the correct perspective is used a work looks its aesthetic best, aesthetic best being a universal depending on the relationship between parts and not a matter of taste, taste being a social or individual preference. Seeing the aesthetic relationship between the parts of a composition depends on using the correct perspective. Finding the right perspective is a matter of trial and error. The perspective that orients an object to the small ego I call frontal perspective. Frontal perspective causes objects to be seen along diverging lines of sight that obliquely intersect contours of the object as with a lens-projected image, a photograph. The object oriented large visual ego I call oriental perspective. With oriental perspective a line of sight runs out from the the edge of the object to an end of the ego. Oriental perspective objects being are seen clearly one at a time as units. Oriental perspective can provide a wide but less clear view. Frontal perspective provides a narrow but very three-dimensional objet. Using frontal perspective in the context of a wide view can result in a composition that is both widely coherent and three-dimensional. The use of a particular perspective to make a thing seems unique to human beings, Homo sapiens sapiens and not used by animals or our ancient relatives the Neanderthals. Differences in perspective form patterns in history of art. For example different perspectives seem to follow the Noah’s Ark theory for the peopling of the earth which begins in Africa and spreads from there. Changes in perspective can also follow the evolution of a culture. For example Greek culture from the tenth through the first century B.C. In Europe as vast social and political changes occur from the first century B.C. to the twelfth century A.D. and beyond perspectives accordingly change. Beginning in Spain in the eleventh century, standard perspectives begin to appear in the emerging nation states. In India and China however perspectives remain more or less the same. In the West during the following centuries differences in perspective between individual artists become important. In the second half of the twentieth century there is an effort to banish the constraints of perspective, of the visual ego. Our brain presents us with an upright, stable optically structured visual world. The visual ego places us at the center of this world so that wherever we look objects are seen lined up with us. We organize and make compressible the visual world by isolating its parts and regularizing their relationships geometrically. In this same way we make a work of art. Nature is a great source of ideas and images, knowledge and beauty, but nature seems endless, ambiguous and contradictory. A work of art is finite. It makes a statement that in contrasting with nature establishes its and our separate being. As such it is akin to religion. Art is here to stay. It is in our genes.