Oil portrait

[Chris Saper]

Dear Catherine et al,

I am in complete agreement that westerners will tend to "read" paintings from left to right; and that a person's first written language dictates their "default" reading direction. The notion of how a painting is "read" is one that I spent many hours researching when putting together text for "Painting Beautiful Skin Tones". (Includes interviews with a developmental pediatrician, a neuro-psychiatrist, two opthalmic surgeons and a speech therapist,as well as a lot of literature review.) Although there is a variety of opinion, there is some support in the literature for the idea that there is a "direction of language".

This idea of a learned visual direction, is, I think, the same mechanism that causes Americans to look the wrong way and step out into traffic in London. I believe it results in tendencies for the Israeli-born viewer to read from right to left and the Chinese-born viewer to read from top to bottom.

I also think it is very important in setting out the composition of a paintng to recognize this idea. To get the left-to-right reader to comfortably read your work from right to left, you can help immensely by giving them obvious visual clues about the eyepaths that you place in the work. Otherwise the painter can risk presenting the discomfort that comes with straddling a visual fence (like the vase-face thing, or the even-distribution of values/shapes/etc thing). One of the most basic things a painter can do is to place proportionately more negative space between the edge of the canvas and the front of the head than is placed between the edge and the back of the head, as Jim shows in the flipped/cropped version. (I mention this as a convention, although, like any convention, I have seen painters break them very successfully, but I am convinced, not accidentally)

I also think that this is the underlying reason that European painters so often placed subject with light coming from the upper left, rather than the upper right...it just felt more comfortable.

I'm interested in other opinions...? Perhaps this is more a Cafe Guerbois topic...

Catherine, I love this piece and find it fresh and painterly. There is little I can add to the very thoughtful critiques that have been posted..the only thing I would note is that the light and shadow temperatures are different in the face and the hair..that is, it seems that a warm light is falling on the hair, while a cool light is falling on the skin; the ear seems a little cool for the shadow tempertures.

Best regards, Chris