From “Four Essays”

Essay1. Some thoughts on perception, modal thought and drawing

(Early in the essay below I refer to the discovery of a sort of limit to perception that consists of 5 to 7 things. We have conducted experiments in the past, as have scientists before us, that demonstrate the eyes can only recognize or count 5 to 7 objects at a glance.)

When I was a student at the Academy, a friend who would later be best man at my wedding gave me a New York Times article about a study Oliver Sacks had done of an artist who had suffered a minor concussion from a bicycle accident. The patient had showed up complaining of a loss of his sense of color vision. The world to him was now a matter of light and dark, a black and white photograph of gray tones. 

Studying one individual with a brain-accident induced malady is pretty much the early history of neurology. In this instance, the injury to this painter’s brain revealed a very interesting and fascinating pathway artists and viewers of the world use. 

Apparently, the rods, which are light/dark receptors in our retinas send information to our brain separately from the information our color sensitive cones do. Not only that, but the black and white receptors (the rods) send their information in first. Whether the circuit length is shorter and thus requires a briefer moment to travel, or whether color detection itself is slower, I don’t know. But the effect in the brain, which we experience as an instantaneous duality of values as well as color is actually layered in time. The black and white version draws a picture, which the color sensitive cones then fill in, almost like a coloring book picture. 

While this has little to teach us about making art, it does explain why we can both comprehend and independently enjoy things like black and white photography, or non-polychromed sculpture. And it also explains why artists have long ago separated drawing from color, building the drawing first in order to cover that with paint of appropriate color. Many of you may have heard of glazing, or grisaille underpainting, which is then layered with thin washes of color. There has been a natural division of labor sponsored by this branching set of visual data that comes from our eyes. 

It wasn’t until the Impressionists stepped outdoors into the sunlight that painting took on the sudden all-at-once nature we and children both know about. Color itself changes as it turns in the separate colors of daylight, here reflecting a bluer version of itself and there a more yellow version. By this means an alert observer can record the changing color field before her and realize — without resorting to value — a picture of form and space. Now, we would be foolish not to include some value differences as well, because for one thing, our paint colors don’t all come with identical values. The blues are often dark, and yellow is brilliant. Of course, to some degree, that also reflects the value ratio between the blue sky and brilliant sunlight. 

You will also notice something interesting  when you are out at night. Perhaps you remember this as the pageant of nature when you watched a sunset in summer and went on sipping wine into the night. What happened in that interval besides bliss? You will remember that the color receptivity of your eyes went from a stunning maximum during sunset, to an almost black and white monochrome of dark blues and greens. Is color simply a weaker signal in physics, or do our eyes not detect it as well as light and dark? 

Cameras devoted to study this use films and filters to study particular regions of the spectrum. These tell us that of all the radiating signals and reflections in the universe, we “see” a very small section of the entire spectrum. The part we see is spread out in rainbows, which you will be happy to know were not understood by Aristotle. But because he described the colors he saw in rainbows so oddly, we might conclude that he may have been color blind. And not only he, but Homer, the Greek poet of the Illiad and Odessey, may have not seen the color of the sky. I only have the evidence of a linguist for this last opinion of Homer, because blue has no name in those works, suggesting the color was unknown to its author. We do know that Homer was aware of a form of blindness brought on by stress — almost a form of visual amnesia. So there may indeed be some special reason Homer knew something might be wrong with his own vision, but that is only a half-hearted suggestion. Cases of battle blindness have been observed throughout history. But let us not dwell long on this. 

I want to return attention to the notion of modal thought. Oliver Sacks postulates a model of the brain that is separated into modes of thought. You might consider this the question of what does the mind do in the brain? We all have this ability to enjoy black and white drawing, apart from color, so those two modes can be enjoyed separately or together. But what about sound and drawing? While we are busy with a spatial task such as drawing or painting, the ambient sounds around us easily fade into silence. A radio seems no longer to be on, and time ironically both slows down and speeds up. If a phone rings, we wake up, but for much of our work the mode of thought that absorbs our attention is on the task at hand. 

That tells us something important about how we are thinking. The right brain is too strict an idea of the brain’s organization, but in a loose way it gathers the notion of modal thought into a label we can use. 

I want to address the notion many of us have had that drawing the way we have been is somehow linked to our subconscious mind. I have an appreciation of what we seem to mean by that term subconscious, but I would like you to know that visual thought is not subconscious. It is actually equally conscious to our word-ear mode of thought, and often more adroit and faster to process things. 

As one example of what I mean, I quote a footnote in Oliver Sacks’s memoir concerning an experiment on thought and brain. The details of the study do not matter as much to this discussion as the record of timing and motive. Here is the quote:

“It was at Mount Zion that Libet performed his astounding experiments showing that if subjects were asked to make a fist or to perform another voluntary action, their brains would register a ‘decision’ nearly half a second before there was any conscious decision to act. While his subjects felt that they had consciously and of their own free will made a movement, their brains had made a decision, seemingly, long before they did.”

If you relate this evidence to how unusually random you think you were as you drew, and then how you felt you were getting to something, and then how you pulled up and stopped, you will realize that something more deliberate than vague unconsciousness may well have been guiding you. Because this exercise in drawing is made to baffle the left brain sense of let’s-go-slow-like-a-sentence-goes, we also attempted and usually achieved a global view of the drawing space — that all-at-once notice of everything there. 

So here is what we have been proposing: that there is a discreet number of things we can see in one glance (5-7), on which the notion of composition must rest. That there are only a few basic compositions used in human history, and that visual art, right from its expression of composition has gotten the age it is in just right. 

When Jackson Pollock paints all over, he is painting one object made of many parts. That unity (a formal art term we will discuss) is the one thing we notice at first. Remember that even though composition can rest on as many as 5 to 7 elements, it doesn’t have to. Anything less than 5 is all the better. Photographers among you may have heard of the rule of three in composition. When you take in a view from the beach, it is easy to see how the world naturally arranged itself into the rule of three: the beach, the water, the sky. But wait, here come two people crossing the view and another in the water. We now have 3+2+1, or, if you view them as a couple, 3+1+1. In either case, we are still within the compositional framework of 5 to 7. Now you might say to me, there are 14 people in the water. At that point we consider it a crowd, which in the glance of things we again categorize as 1. 

Of course, we love to walk up to paintings and study them in isolated vignettes. There your crowd dissolves into a constellation of figures, and they must compose themselves in ways we find appropriate to what we intend. 

So we have established some matters of perception that are always with us, and the notion of self-isolating modes of thought that assist us in focus and special creative tasks. But what about the higher reasons for art? What of this knowledge will ever create the overwhelming response in our audience we should rightly want to achieve? Haven’t we all been moved, especially when quite young, by art? And why is it that otherwise sane people can be heard crying and weeping during part of an opera? What is all this about? And is emotion like that not due to thought? Yet, who is thinking? And what is the empathy that makes such experience in the face of art possible?

I will leave this for you to wonder about. If you have theories, and I know some of you  must, don’t hesitate to send them to us. We will be returning to this discussion further on in the course, even if silence prevails right now. 

And please send me your projects, in drawing, or painting, as you are emboldened to trust your visual mind, and the speed at which it thinks. I look forward to everything you do. 

All the best,

John Sevcik