Issue #15 - Modes of Perception (Happy New Year)
View of Southwest Amarillo with Subdivision by Me, Sharpie on copy paper.
Modes of Perception
My sketch is not good, but I made certain choices in the depiction of my back door view of Amarillo. First, Sharpie as a medium is clumsy. I’ve seen excellent artists use Sharpies to great effect, but the inability to blend their colors make them useless for realism. So choosing the Sharpie takes realism off the table.
Second, I used black on stark, white paper. Values are absolute here. No subtlety or nuance. No gradients. No three-dimensional volume. All objects rest in the same line of depth or distance. An effort to indicate distance from the viewer is attempted by rendering objects as indistinct from each other. The only object that stands out is the water tower that draws its supply from unseen wells, tapping the non-replenishable Ogallala aquifer, then stored high above the city’s skyline; a promise of life continuing.
Distance from an object can also be shown by enlarging, or including more foreground, but the horizon line (literally a line here) is set low in the composition, which makes the objects feel closer to the viewer than their rendering would indicate. The suggestion of electrical lines leads the viewer’s eye away from the conglomeration of houses. The movement here indicates that the piling, the thoughtless cramming of indistinct houses will continue, following the hastily rendered infrastructure of urban sprawl.
I’ve hoped to do three things by the critical viewing of my own sketch:
- Any good faith artistic endeavor, a transformation of reality into art, can be given serious thought (although, life is short, so choose wisely).
- My bad sketch and analysis are actually pretty accurate of my feelings towards the development happening in Amarillo.
- To set you up for this next painting, which (kind of) served as the model for my sketch. I hope you give it the same kind of attention I gave my own bad sketch, and John Walford’s critical context.
View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields by Jacob van Ruisdael, Oil on canvas, 1670-75.
The freshness and so-called realism of Dutch landscape paintings, in contrast to the evident artifice of landscapes produced elsewhere in seventeenth-century Europe, have generated not only a diversity of reaction from scorn to praise, but also no little disagreement as to their character and intent. The more closely an image approximates to natural appearances, the more easily one can overlook the modes of perception that inevitably influence the transformation of landscape into art. - John Walford, Jacob van Ruisdael and the Perception of Landscape.
Van Ruisdael clearly developed his perception to see things in a camera-like manner, but Walford’s main argument is that van Ruisdael’s imagination is informed by beliefs that account for many of the decisions he made when he began to compose this painting. For one, notice how large the church looms on the horizon line. Most of Haarlem is left indistinct– rooftops and a few spires, but the church clasps the deep foreground of peasants in bleaching fields (and cloud shadows) to the heavens massive clouds. If van Ruisdael had set up his easel in the bleaching fields next to the workers, then our view of Haarlem would merely be trees, and he was excellent at painting trees. This perspective of Haarlem is telling.
Even the arrangement of cloud shadows is worth attending. The clouds themselves take up 2/3 of the composition, but their evidence is scattered across the remaining third, disclosing the bleaching fields and Haarlem represented by the church, but hiding the chaotic forest in deep shade.
Despite the realistic rendering, don’t overlook the modes of perception that influenced the transformation of landscape into art.
Before we leave Haarlem, consider the reversal of van Ruisdael’s composition (2/3 ground, 1/3 clouds) in a painting we’ve considered before in this newsletter.
I’m not a visual artist. I know the clumsy medium of Sharpie draws attention to itself in a way that elegant oil does not. My decisions, or modes, are apparent. But I am a writer and words-as-medium are also transforming reality onto a canvas in the reader’s mind. I don’t want to overlook that miracle.
Be well in the new year. Thanks for the company these past nine months.