Advantage or Handicap?

[Timothy C. Tyler]

We have binary vision to help us read depth, movement, form..it's pointless to deny this in our painting. Closing one eye either has an effect on what we see (the subject) or it's a waste of time. The effect it must have is to flatten out the subject. So, if we completely suceed in nailing the subject then we capture a flatter image and get quite naturally a flatter painting.

I don't see why we would want that. It's the roundness of artists like Sargent and Hals that separate their work from someone like T. Eakins who loved the one-eyed camera. (I have never seen one color sketch of his done to use with the photos.)

[Steven Sweeney]

Fortunately, everyone is free to have a go at whatever methodology works for them, and let the results speak for themselves. My own methodology is exactly as I've detailed, and it produces anything but flat paintings. It has to do with initial measurements and placement, with making assessments about relative positions of reference points, and nothing to do with depth, form or movement. That was the point of my second paragraph.

[Timothy C. Tyler]

What does memory have to do with seeing (from nature)?

[Steven Sweeney]

Everything or nothing, depending on the enquiry and its intent.

I'll try to pull a hurdle off the track before anyone feels challenged to jump it, or raise it, in the interest of semantics. The whole point of accurately and sensitively "seeing" an object in nature is -- not for the window shopper, no, but for the artist, yes -- to transfer the impressions from that activity or exercise onto paper or canvas or scratchboard, into clay or plaster or marble. If we're "just looking" and no more, then memory has no useful role to play. If we wish to capture the visual impressions we've sensed from our encounter with the objects in nature, so that we can turn and replicate those impressions with some degree of integrity and accuracy, we are necessarily using memory -- in this case, short-term memory.

(The point here isn't at all about long-term memory, or recollections, or imagining birth experiences or such things. Long-term memory is clouded with all manner of interpretation, preconception, cultural molding, and both loss and creation of details. The issue here is NOT "memory vs. observation". The dynamic in play is observation, recording of the visual data, and transfer of that information to the artist's working surface or material. And that transfer absolutely requires the operation of memory, albeit short-term.)

"Memory training," "memory exercises," "memory work" -- however labeled -- is a staple of rigorous training in drawing, particularly figure drawing. It often takes the form of simply viewing, say, irregular polygons for 30 seconds, putting the sample away, and trying to immediately recreate it from memory. First efforts are usually discouraging, but the facility develops quite rapidly, and soon the student artist gains confidence in his or her ability to see an object in nature -- to pay attention to it, to make spatial and relational judgments as between its parts -- and to quickly turn attention to the easel or armature and replicate the information just captured in memory. There's no other way to make that transfer, short of projectors or other mechanical or optical devices that leave the artist out of the process.

Later memory training might involve viewing a model in the life room for, say, three minutes, then having that model leave the stand, whereupon the students are challenged to draw or paint what they've just observed. Another exercise is to view a color sample for one minute, put it away and try to accurately replicate the hue and value of that sample on your canvas. Over time, the sample and your efforts will become closer and closer to a match, which will mean that more and more of what you put down on the paper or canvas, whether in the studio or in the field, will be accurate the first time.

That's kind of a short version of an answer that could go on endlessly (and I'm the guy to do that!). Aristotle was trying to get at the nature of memory quite a long time ago (I forget exactly how long ago), so interest in the psychophysiological processes has been keen for a while.

I'm admittedly at a loss to quite understand the thesis or objection in opposition to this. I don't know how else the human artist collects and transfers visual information other than through the memory processes.

[Steven Sweeney]

It's the roundness of artists like Sargent and Hals that separate their work from someone like T. Eakins who loved the one-eyed camera.

I'm late to the vocation and not altogether familiar with Eakins' failings, but in researching another matter I was reminded that the Art Students League's famous instructor, Robert Beverly Hale, chose some of Eakins' work to illustrate his master class figure drawing lessons, which suffer from no dearth of roundness or form.

It was a highlight of my young and I suppose pruriently energized introduction to art, to read Hale's commentary, a sidebar to Eakins' drawing, on "The Breast -- Front View":

"[Y]ou should always place the breasts so that they look this way and that way. This one is looking up at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and this one is looking to the police precinct on 58th Street. That's the way they ought to be placed -- church and state. Do not let them look straight ahead."

[Mari DeRuntz]

"T. Eakins who loved the one-eyed camera. (I have never seen one color sketch of his done to use with the photos.)"

Hi Tim,

From my understanding, photography became a more important tool to Eakins when the Pennslyvania Academy of Art (where he taught) forbade him from having his students model for each other. He then went "off campus" (camera as a medium to capture form in nature) for preliminary studies. Because of his passionate work from the human form, he was in fact fired, amid rumors of incest and bestiality. Source: Thomas Eakins, ed. by Darrel Sewell, Yale University Press.

I've always seen Eakins as a true naturalist, insisting on life classes, even anatomical dissection.

[Timothy C. Tyler]

Steven,

you're a bright guy and a good writer, I enjoy reading what you have to say even when I don't agree.

Hugs,
Tim