On Seeing.
Seeing is one of my ongoing interests: there is a difference between looking and seeing. There is perception and there is selective seeing: “No one is so blind as he who will not see”. When we see something, what exactly do we see? What do we allow ourselves to see and what do we not allow ourselves to see? Do we see what is there to be seen?
There are many things to be seen in an artwork. I will begin with the three plastic elements.
Color:
In our earliest school years we learn our letters, our numbers, and our colors: as children we learn three languages simultaneously. Each of those three languages has a unique vocabulary.
Our responses to the value of color might be as lost to us as is our sense of smell. This loss can be accounted for if we realize that painting has come to be considered an intellectual exercise. Too often we confront a painting and ask: What does it mean? A painting is a visual experience. We should experience the painting before we analyze it intellectually. If the artist or the observer needs to intellectualize the work, it has failed to do its job. The analysis of an artwork is an attempt to deepen our understanding of it. I would suggest that as observers of artworks, we need to allow the colors to speak to us
“What is your favorite color?” is one of the most common childhood games. The colors most often chosen are the primaries or green or violet of the secondaries. Rarely have I known anyone to choose orange. Of the six primary and secondary colors, orange seems the most purely chemical and the one with the least symbolic value. Yet I have seen many infants in strollers fixated on the color orange, in fact, their attention seems most arrested by that color. Therapists urge us to reclaim the lost child within: we might be well advised to start that process through getting reacquainted with the color orange.
When I studied set design one of the exercises we were given, to be done on our own time and for our own edification, was to tear pages out of magazines with colors on them that appealed to us. Once we had created an appreciable number of pages we were to arrange the pages according to color. The stack or stacks with the greatest number of pages would reveal to us our color preferences.
Black is an exception to color as a lost symbolic experience. At the Chicago Art Institute I was looking at a very large Ad Reinhardt painting, approximately twelve feet wide by twenty feet high. It was all black. A young couple and their two children walked in front of me across the painting as if before a painted drop on a vaudeville stage. Both the man and his wife were short and both were fairly bursting with the pride of their superior education and their economic attainments. Rather than apologize for blocking the view, they assumed, incorrectly, that they were the view. One of the children was an infant in a stroller; the other child was a girl about three and a half years old.
Suddenly the young girl walked to the center of the painting and bent her neck backwards as she looked up to the top of the work. Then, spinning around and putting her hands on her hips, she stamped her foot and addressed the room: “What is this doing here! This doesn’t belong here!” And raising her left arm and pointing off stage she exclaimed: “Take this away!”
The young father strutted across the full stage, taking a bow for his child’s performance, while his wife stood behind her stroller and, with her head to one side, beamed approvingly, not because the child had become an accomplished art critic, but because she had so completely ingested the young mother’s persona.
We have culturally conditioned responses, (like mother like daughter …for that reason I never trust the judgments of children), and personal responses (a preference for the color orange). That distinction should be made when we look at a painting. Do I see what I see or am I only seeing what others want me to see?
Among suburban housewives the choice of color in the decorating scheme is too often based on what is known as “the color for the season”, a color chosen by some unknown authority in the fashion world. For that reason decorated suburban spaces almost always lack the sense of the personal, they are anonymous spaces, but very much in style.
Most art appreciation courses direct the student to study the color key of a painting…complementary, analogous, split complementary. We are told to ascertain the chromaticity of the colors, the degree of gray or lack of gray.
We should also look at the colors in an artist’s complete body of work: are the colors the same over the years or do they vary and are they different according to his different subjects.
In Marsden Hartley’s early works he used the colors of the European modernists. Later, in the American southwest, he used the palette of the American Impressionists. It was not until his last paintings, made in Maine, that a personal color sense becomes evident in his works.
For most of his career Cézanne worked with a very limited palette; but he worked in a very limited geographical area. Are his colors local colors or have they been heightened to be more expressive? The same can be considered in Corot’s work.
Matisse is very related to Cézanne, yet I cannot think of one color or palette that dominates in his work overall.
Neither do I think of dominant colors in Picasso’s work. In fact, in my response to the first comment on this blog, I mention Picasso’s Guernica and that painting is made in black, white, and gray.
This, in turn, recalls Goya’s comment: “I can suggest all the colors in a black and white drawing.”
In painting after painting I see that Hans Hoffman used only the three primaries and the three secondary colors. They are pure pigments and there is rarely any intermixing.
In his screen prints, Andy Warhol made series of prints from the same screens but each series has a different color key, as if to refute the value of color and to imply that it has no symbolic meaning. It is in his use of color, in fact, that Warhol’s work can be understood as a dialogue about art. He is far more intelligent than he pretended to be.
For a retrospective at the Museum of Modern art, Louise Nevelson created a series of signature works, but in white, purposefully to be very distinct from her works in their signature black.
The colors in an artist’s palette might be unconsciously chosen but I am certain that they are not arbitrarily chosen. The artist uses those colors as a visual and symbolic language. Specific colors are something that an artist “feels”. They are a part of his metabolism. It is our job to sense what that is. We might also ascertain if an artist is merely “using” colors but without feeling. I sense that in the work of many contemporary photographers who seem to be attempting to make their works look “modern”. The personal choice of color gives an artwork authenticity.
I agree: color is the first thing we see when we look at a painting. But what is it we see? Do we see the color used or do we sense that which has been expressed through the use of color? Do we like or dislike a painting, or an artist’s entire works, because we like or dislike his palette. How often have we heard: I don’t like his color sense, or I don’t care for his use of color.
And why does it matter if we take the time to understand what we see? Because just as art begets art, so understanding begets understanding: it is with perception that we gain insight. It is to our advantage to do the work of the observer.
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About Me
- The Observer
- If you love painting as much as I do you will love Oaxaca ...as much as I do. I haven't yet ascertained if the people of Oaxaca love to paint or to just cover everything with layers of paint. But it is a colorful and much painted environment from outdoor street murals, graffiti, signs, folk art, decorative finishes, and just about everything in between. In the visual arts I like drawing, painting, architecture, and photography. I am not a fan of graphic art, prints, of which the city is a center here in Mexico, but it has an abundance of painting, drawing, and architecture so I have ample to hold my attention. And as a lover of color, as I walk now familiar streets or venture into new areas I am constantly delighted by the discoveries I make. This blog is my way of sharing the journey of my discoveries as well as the thoughts these provoke from a lifetime of looking at art and creating art. Emerson wrote: Man is endogenous and education is his unfolding. How true that is.
The Aesthetic
The Aesthetic.
I was trained as a set designer and I have studied life drawing at The Art Student’s League and NYU. I lived and worked in New York City for nearly thirty years. Recently I have felt that I needed to develop a better working criterion for looking at art works. Over the years three books have been very important to me and so I have used them to hone my understanding: The Art in Painting, by Alfred Barnes, of the Barnes Foundation; Problems in Art, by Susanne Langer, the American philosopher; and the essay, Kitsch and Modern Art, by Clement Greenberg, the American art critic.
Alfred Barnes promotes his belief that the appreciation of art can be taught just as science can be taught…through methodology. In the introduction to his book there is a long paragraph that sets forth his premise. But I think that a shorter version in the Barnes Foundation literature is sufficient here: “One cannot understand art by walking through a museum anymore than he can master surgery by walking though a hospital.” Barnes insists that the observer has to work as hard to understand an artwork as the artist did to create it. He begins the educational approach by naming the three plastic elements of painting: color, line, and form. Each of these is visible on the surface and each has as well a sub textural presence: color is the actual color seen but a painting has as well a tenor, a color overall. Line is a visible line but within a painting a line carries the eye. The painting has a vertical, a horizontal, or a diagonal line. Form is the visible evidence of geometric forms but it is also the summation of the totality of the work. He suggests that the person who wants to understand an artwork must begin with an understanding of the way color has been used because color is the first thing we see in a painting.
In her work Susanne Langer states that every culture has left evidence of a need for symbolic experience and that that need has been manifest in magic and ritual, religion and art. It is her view that the artist produces an artwork in order to express his feelings about something. When his mastery of craft allows him to have insights during the creation of the work at hand, that gives that particular work significant meaning. Those two elements, if brought together, result in the creation of an artwork. My disagreement with her concerns her preference for the use of the word “feeling”. There seems to be too much misunderstanding of “feeling” in looking at artwork. Too many persons are of the conviction now that the artist is expressing his emotions…I felt like such and such and so I painted this in this way to express myself, my emotions. I prefer to use the word “sentiments” in the same sense that Flaubert used it in his novel, A Sentimental Education. His novel was not about the developing melancholy (the emotional state) of a particular person but about that person’s forming a sensate understanding of the world in which he lives and as an aid for his adult life.
Where Langer uses the word feeling, Barnes states that an artist creates art because he has an added “interest”. He describes this as a compelling interest. I prefer to define it as a profound interest. Certainly an interest in any subject or effort is unlikely to produce major artworks unless it is more than an interest and more than compelling. I think profound is the right word. Very likely we refer to an artist or craftsman as a dilettante when we examine the complete works and find little that has sustained him other than his cursory interests or appeals to our own. And it is in the merely casual interest that we discover the distinction made by Clement Greenberg between kitsch and modern art. He defines kitsch as that which is pre digested for us, that which is easily digested, and he defines art as that which we may not always grasp at first sight but which creates a lingering iconic memory that we find resonating in our mind. It is that which resonates that causes us to go back, to return to the source and to look with greater attention at particular works. Eventually, through study and through opening ourselves to the experience, we may come to recognize these as the artworks.
This, then, became my criterion for viewing art works; that which we study is the artist’s mastery of craft, his expression of a profound interest, his insights which have come to him during the creation of the particular work that resonates with us, and in his decisive expression of “something”. In each artwork there is that which is “expressed”. In looking at every art work the observer “experiences” something. Thus there are two questions raised by every artwork: What is expressed? What is experienced? When the observer resolves this question with an understanding of the artist’s work and his intention, a communication between artist and observer has been effected. From this perspective it can be understood that an artwork is not merely an object placed on a wall before the observer but an experience to be shared.
By stating that I have devised a system for looking at artworks I should add that I do not use this system to the exclusion of opening myself up to another experience. Early in my adult life I was made aware that Aristotle’s Poetics was written long after the Greek tragedies it describes were written. The Poetics is the record of his response and efforts toward understanding of those deeply moving works. I firmly believe that first and foremost an observer of art should allow the work to communicate with him. It is when the work is presented with museum credentials or appears authentic and one does not hear what it says that one could fall back on a system for analyzing it and achieving understanding.
I was trained as a set designer and I have studied life drawing at The Art Student’s League and NYU. I lived and worked in New York City for nearly thirty years. Recently I have felt that I needed to develop a better working criterion for looking at art works. Over the years three books have been very important to me and so I have used them to hone my understanding: The Art in Painting, by Alfred Barnes, of the Barnes Foundation; Problems in Art, by Susanne Langer, the American philosopher; and the essay, Kitsch and Modern Art, by Clement Greenberg, the American art critic.
Alfred Barnes promotes his belief that the appreciation of art can be taught just as science can be taught…through methodology. In the introduction to his book there is a long paragraph that sets forth his premise. But I think that a shorter version in the Barnes Foundation literature is sufficient here: “One cannot understand art by walking through a museum anymore than he can master surgery by walking though a hospital.” Barnes insists that the observer has to work as hard to understand an artwork as the artist did to create it. He begins the educational approach by naming the three plastic elements of painting: color, line, and form. Each of these is visible on the surface and each has as well a sub textural presence: color is the actual color seen but a painting has as well a tenor, a color overall. Line is a visible line but within a painting a line carries the eye. The painting has a vertical, a horizontal, or a diagonal line. Form is the visible evidence of geometric forms but it is also the summation of the totality of the work. He suggests that the person who wants to understand an artwork must begin with an understanding of the way color has been used because color is the first thing we see in a painting.
In her work Susanne Langer states that every culture has left evidence of a need for symbolic experience and that that need has been manifest in magic and ritual, religion and art. It is her view that the artist produces an artwork in order to express his feelings about something. When his mastery of craft allows him to have insights during the creation of the work at hand, that gives that particular work significant meaning. Those two elements, if brought together, result in the creation of an artwork. My disagreement with her concerns her preference for the use of the word “feeling”. There seems to be too much misunderstanding of “feeling” in looking at artwork. Too many persons are of the conviction now that the artist is expressing his emotions…I felt like such and such and so I painted this in this way to express myself, my emotions. I prefer to use the word “sentiments” in the same sense that Flaubert used it in his novel, A Sentimental Education. His novel was not about the developing melancholy (the emotional state) of a particular person but about that person’s forming a sensate understanding of the world in which he lives and as an aid for his adult life.
Where Langer uses the word feeling, Barnes states that an artist creates art because he has an added “interest”. He describes this as a compelling interest. I prefer to define it as a profound interest. Certainly an interest in any subject or effort is unlikely to produce major artworks unless it is more than an interest and more than compelling. I think profound is the right word. Very likely we refer to an artist or craftsman as a dilettante when we examine the complete works and find little that has sustained him other than his cursory interests or appeals to our own. And it is in the merely casual interest that we discover the distinction made by Clement Greenberg between kitsch and modern art. He defines kitsch as that which is pre digested for us, that which is easily digested, and he defines art as that which we may not always grasp at first sight but which creates a lingering iconic memory that we find resonating in our mind. It is that which resonates that causes us to go back, to return to the source and to look with greater attention at particular works. Eventually, through study and through opening ourselves to the experience, we may come to recognize these as the artworks.
This, then, became my criterion for viewing art works; that which we study is the artist’s mastery of craft, his expression of a profound interest, his insights which have come to him during the creation of the particular work that resonates with us, and in his decisive expression of “something”. In each artwork there is that which is “expressed”. In looking at every art work the observer “experiences” something. Thus there are two questions raised by every artwork: What is expressed? What is experienced? When the observer resolves this question with an understanding of the artist’s work and his intention, a communication between artist and observer has been effected. From this perspective it can be understood that an artwork is not merely an object placed on a wall before the observer but an experience to be shared.
By stating that I have devised a system for looking at artworks I should add that I do not use this system to the exclusion of opening myself up to another experience. Early in my adult life I was made aware that Aristotle’s Poetics was written long after the Greek tragedies it describes were written. The Poetics is the record of his response and efforts toward understanding of those deeply moving works. I firmly believe that first and foremost an observer of art should allow the work to communicate with him. It is when the work is presented with museum credentials or appears authentic and one does not hear what it says that one could fall back on a system for analyzing it and achieving understanding.
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