Marshall Islands stick chart, a map of islands, ocean swells, and currents, original source of photo unknown

Synchronicity is a concept describing how seemingly unrelated things take on meaning by being experienced concurrently.  Years ago a friend gave me the Fall 1991 issue of the magazine “Whole Earth Review”.  It is 144 pages densely filled with a wide variety of articles on technology, ecology, and human potential – the promo on the inside front cover starts, “Mayans, Hawaiians, and Tibetans.  Virtual reality, psychedelic alchemy, neuro-tarot.  Youth culture and elder care.  Teaching lumber companies not to trespass.  Radio as anarchic medium.  A grandmother’s advice on childrearing.  Zines.  Independent music producers.  Lucid dreams.”  Lots of interesting thoughts and speculations there.

There were two articles within that issue that stuck with me and that have informed my thought and my creative process ever since.  The magazine draws no particular connection between the two articles – it puts them in separate sections – but both have to do with developing special perceptual skills for purposes of moving through the world.  If I hadn’t encountered these articles in the same place, they might not have made such an impression on me, but their alignment opened a door for me about how we can train and expand our perception of the world, not through drugs or mystical experiences, but through simple practice.

For me, artistic development is about learning to perceive more deeply, to notice beauty that most miss.  Mass commercial culture is all about bombarding people with sensations, pushing their buttons and pulling their strings.  By appreciating subtle things and enjoying all the fantastic phenomena the world gives us for free, we can liberate ourselves from commercial mind control.  But even if you don’t care about all that and just read this blog for the drawing tips, there’s no technique more powerful than learning to see more when you look.

So, back to “Whole Earth Review” – both of the articles I’ll be talking about are available in full online, and you’ll find a list of links at the bottom of this post.

Cover of "Whole Earth Review", Fall 1991 issue

“Nightwalking: Exploring the Dark with Peripheral Vision” tells of its authors Zink and Parks’ experiments in enhancing peripheral vision.  The human eye contains two types of light sensitive receptor cells.  Cones, densely packed in the center of the visual field, see color and fine detail.  Rods predominate in the outer circle of the visual field.  They see neither color nor fine detail, but are far more sensitive than the cone cells in dark conditions.  The visual cortex uses this peripheral rod vision for orientation and to notice movement happening away from our point of focus.  (See my earlier post, “Exercising Perception”, or my guest post on Daniel Maidman’s blog for more detail on all this.)

Peripheral vision is usually a subconscious process.  Zink and Parks found that they could expand their conscious attention into the peripheral visual field by locking their central vision on the end of a stick attached to a hat and extending about a foot in front of their eyes.  When the focal point is immobilized, awareness is free to move elsewhere.  They practiced hiking in the desert, over very uneven terrain, this way, and found that they were able to move smoothly and sure-footedly, avoiding obstacles and pitfalls without looking at them.

Even before I read this article I had been doing perceptual experiments on my own.  I had often tried walking around the city with my eyes crossed, which is essentially the same thing Zink and Parks were doing, and had discovered the fascinating ability to watch things happening far away from my line of sight, even simultaneous things on opposite sides of me.

New Mexico Desert at Night, photographer unknown

Since the peripheral visual field is dominated by rod cells, noted for their high sensitivity to extremely low levels of light, Zink and Parks decided to try the technique walking in the wilderness in the moonless night.  If you’ve tried walking on a moonless (or new moon or crescent moon) night far from artificial light sources, you know how hard it can be to see where you’re stepping or what’s around you.  Zink and Parks again used the hat with a stick in front, adding a dot of phosphorescent paint to the end of the stick, and again went hiking in the New Mexico wilds.  They found they were able to see all sorts of things one would never see by normal looking in the dark – rabbits and bats moving around them, the faint bioluminescence of decaying wood.  They were able to move swiftly and safely over rocks and ravines.  (I wonder if anyone has tried this in a dense forest at night – that would be much darker than the open desert landscape, even on a moonless night.)

Nightwalking participant, from Australian site NLP Cafe Brisbane. This nightwalker's hat has a glow-in-the-dark plastic heart instead of a dot of phosphorescent paint as described in Zink's original article. Photographer unknown.

In my own practice as an artist, I’ve found the ability to move my awareness into the peripheral visual field is a vital skill.  I can look at a detail with my sharp central field and still maintain a sense of the whole of what I’m looking at because the peripheral vision is taking it all in.  Many observational artists intuitively squint at their subject – this disables the sharp vision, helping you to see the whole pattern.  A deliberate practice of developing peripheral sight can be even more powerful.

Centered on the Feet, 2012, watercolor on paper, by Fred Hatt

The second article that struck me in the Fall 1991 issue of “Whole Earth Review” was “The Soft, Warm, Wet Technology of Native Oceania,” Harriet Witt-Miller’s piece on the traditional navigation techniques of the peoples of the Pacific islands.  Eighteenth-century European explorers were astonished to find that the far-flung islands of the Pacific, widely scattered across thousands of miles of open ocean, had nearly all been settled long ago by people with outrigger canoes who had no sextants or compasses or chronometers.  How did they cross such distances, and find tiny dots of land in the vast expanse of ocean?

Micronesian Proa, still from "The Navigators", a film by Sam Low

These cultures, now tragically threatened by rising sea levels, had highly sophisticated methods of accurate maritime navigation, all based on direct observation rather than on abstract patterns such as latitude and longitude or the geometrical satellite array of the Global Positioning System.

GPS satellites, original source of illustration unknown

Traditional Pacific navigators or wayfinders learn to observe very subtle things.  They can look at the light reflecting off the bottom of a distant cloud and tell whether it is over green land or over a coral atoll’s crystalline lagoon, thus detecting islands beyond the horizon.  They know the stars and the way their arcs of movement change with the hour and the season.  They observe the behavior of sea birds and the properties of water and floating debris to determine in what direction lies land.  They have a deep understanding of the movement of wind and water currents.  They learn to distinguish the constant patterns of ocean swells from the shifting surface waves by sensing the deeper movements with their scrotums resting on the bottom of their boats.

Currents of the Pacific, warm currents in orange, cold currents in green, original source of map unknown

The Micronesians map their world with “stick charts”, made of palm sticks.  According to the caption of the below illustration from Witt-Miller’s article, credited to “Exploratorium Quarterly”, “Curved sticks showed prevailing wave fronts, shells represented the locations of islands, and threads indicated where islands came into view.”

Micronesian stick map, illustration from "Whole Earth Review", Fall 1991 issue, page 67

Western ways of knowledge and technology have often been about superimposing an abstract pattern over the real world, and operating according to the abstraction.  For the visual artist, that traditionally means systems of linear perspective, canons of human proportion, color theories, etc.  For the contemporary artist it may also include the abstracting analyses of critical theory and semiotics.

Proportions of Man, 1557, by Albrecht Dürer

I understand and use such abstractions – well, critical theory, not so much – but in my own practice of observational figure drawing I stay much closer to the Pacific wayfinder’s method, looking at subtleties of reflected light, following the swells and hollows of the model’s body as though I am moving across a territory.  I look at the points of inflection, such as nipples or kneecaps, in terms of angular relationships and the flowing patterns that join them, as the sticks connect the shells on a Micronesian sailing chart.  My process is tactile.  I feel my way along.

Hands Reversed, 2012, black watercolor on paper, by Fred Hatt

All of these different kinds of observation are happening simultaneously, or in quick succession.  Part of my mind is aware of the peripheral view.  Part of it is looking at the colors in the shadows or the direction of hairs on the body.  Part of it is mapping the points and following the flows.  Part of it is focused on my paper, my brush, my colors.  It is impossible to coordinate all these factors into a systematic method I could describe or define.  The magic that makes it work is intuition, the power of the mind to integrate a torrent of incoming sensations, conscious and not, into a coherent experience.  Intuition is trained by practice, not by theory.  It must be rigorously exercised, and then it must be trusted.

As I have pursued my artistic discipline, I have been deeply informed by these ideas of navigational perception.  To draw or paint or sculpt from observation is to explore, to discover, to wonder.

Both the short articles cited here are full of details I haven’t mentioned, and well worth reading for themselves:

 “Nightwalking: Exploring the Dark with Peripheral Vision”, by Nelson Zink and Stephen Parks

“The Soft, Warm, Wet Technology of Native Oceania”, by Harriet Witt-Miller

Both articles were originally published in “Whole Earth Review” No. 72, Fall, 1991.

Other relevant links:

Nelson Zink’s website NavaChing

Harriet Witt’s website Passenger Planet

Exploratorium’s website “Never Lost” on Polynesian navigation

Sam Low’s article “A World of Natural Signs”

Illustrations here besides my own drawings were found on the web.  Clicking on a picture will take you to the place where I found it.

Ray, 2012, by Fred Hatt

a person is a bit of this and a bit of that

fuzzy tendencies overlapping, interacting

forged and scourged in the kiln of embodied life

Earrings, 2012, by Fred Hatt

eyes ions, black magnetic pools

A la plage, 2012, by Fred Hatt

zone in on tones

undertone, overtone, midtone

let the parts fall where they may

Elbows & Knees, 2012, by Fred Hatt

body takes a beating just doing the day by day

Brooder, 2012, by Fred Hatt

why are things so

what do things mean

how do things work

Curvature, 2012, by Fred Hatt

a serpent grows limbs

a head aloft partakes of the clouds of heaven

as well as the dirt of the ground

Sleep Tight, 2012, by Fred Hatt

a stack of bones

opal tones

Halt, 2011, by Fred Hatt

expand, contract

concentrate, dissipate

Defeat, 2012, by Fred Hatt

hands ground down while forces face forward

Muscles of the Back, 2012, by Fred Hatt

the bones are the slowest river

the flesh, the nerves, the blood grow to flow, each in its way

life is a convulsion of matter

Gray, 2012, by Fred Hatt

eyes tomorrow

seated present

Outward & Inward, 2012, by Fred Hatt

sentry and slave

guard the grave

Defiant, 2012, by Fred Hatt

the body of light harbors a shade

the body of shadow contains a glow

Graces, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Luna Triune: wax and full and wane and new

the new of course unseen

every cycle has its way, its period, its mystery

each single season’s unique, any noise has its timbre

all is oscillation, orbs in orbit

go down long, draw in and in, only finally open out

Degasian, 2012, by Fred Hatt

bow, bend, lay low

tack and parry, stealthy slow

like grass grows

Retrospect, 2011, by Fred Hatt

space is light

matter is force

time is mind

Rorrim, 2012, by Fred Hatt

feeling with eyes, rove over ridges and marshes and creeks

body is topography and self is weather

sometimes stormy, often calm

Fine Lines, 2012, by Fred Hatt

I am made of moss and ferns

mushrooms and minnows and dim glow worms

Faun, 2012, by Fred Hatt

man is land

containing imagination

soil to till

seed to spill

Heartache, 2012, by Fred Hatt

bereft chest

abject head

trunk bent

tower leant

Brothers, 2012, by Fred Hatt

a man knows a man, nothing said

All the images in this post are watercolor on paper, sometimes with a little white gouache.  I painted all these within the last two months.  Sizes:

Graces and Rorrim:  38″ x 50″ (96.5 x 127 cm).

Ray, Earrings, Elbows & Knees, Sleep Tight, Gray, Defiant, Retrospect, Fine Lines, Faun, Heartache, Brothers:  19″ x 24″ (48.3 x 61 cm).

A la plage, Brooder, Curvature, Halt, Defiant, Muscles of the Back, Outward & Inward, Degasian: 14″ x 17″ (35.6 x 43.2 cm).

Twixt, 2011, by Fred Hatt

How do you make change in the world?  Even I, who love finding beauty amid the world’s insanity and squalor, yearn for a kinder and juster culture.  Does art have any part in that, or is it just entertainment, an idle pastime of the privileged?  You surely see a lot of contemporary art that addresses injustice, stigma, corruption, exploitation, and violence.  But doesn’t much of that kind of art seem exploitive itself?  During a recent museum visit I saw mural-sized photos of homeless people in humiliating positions, and installations that made real footage of war and prison killings look like video games.  Do you suppose these works will change the minds of the powerful or offer any solace to the souls with whose real suffering they toy?  Do the artists who do this work or the curators who put it on display imagine that they are displaying a social conscience?  Ah, the abject of the world, the war-scarred, the enslaved – let them eat critical theory!

Perhaps it is pretentious for an artist even to pretend to care.  Social change is a complex phenomenon involving myriad conflicting and interacting forces.  The power that an artist has to influence the process of change in society would seem like the power of a mosquito to change the course of an ocean liner.  Even the mass-produced forms of entertainment such as movies and pop music no longer reach the vast audiences they once did.  The kind of art that shows in galleries or alternative performance venues, reaching a minuscule audience, must surely have no impact at all.

Ovum, 2011, by Fred Hatt

People think that the kind of power that produces change must be a direct push.  Huge advertising campaigns, political activism, legal crusades, large-scale economic offenses such as boycotts and buyouts, military or revolutionary attacks are all attempts to leverage monetary, demographic, or violent power to change things in a direct way.  History shows us that such efforts tend to produce unintended consequences such as political backlash movements or power vacuums that allow ruthless people to seize control.  There is a physical law that states that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, and this often seems to apply to clashing cultural forces as well.

There is a different way of producing change, which may be described by the metaphor of planting seeds.  A seed is a tiny thing which contains the potential for the development of a tree or plant.  In nature, plants have various ways of scattering their seeds widely.  Most seeds will not find the conditions necessary to become a mature plant, but enough may grow to perpetuate and even increase the range of the plant that produced them.  Each seed begins to develop in darkness and obscurity and there is no way to see that it is growing until it is emerging into the world as a fresh new manifestation of life.  The very obscurity and indirectness of this process may make change that overcomes the reactionary recoil effect.

Radia, 2011, by Fred Hatt

The metaphor of the seed appears in a famous parable of Jesus, quoted here from the Gospel of Thomas, translated by Patterson and Robinson:

In the canonical gospels, the seed is interpreted as representing the word of Christ, which may or may not take root in the hearts of those who hear it, but I think it works well as a wider metaphor of how the world works.  It even describes the evolution of species, in which mutations are scattered haphazardly like seeds, most fail, but a few find the conditions to flourish.  A process that might seem random and wasteful is the process that produces our world with all its wondrous variety.

Umbilicus, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Culture, too, is a seeding process.  In the internet era, an idea or style that sprouts and spreads in the culture is called a meme, and its explosive growth is called “going viral” (reminding us that a virus is also a kind of seed, and that the effects of a seed are not necessarily positive).  But viral memes are not all lolcats – Steve Jobs’ vision of friendly technology and Gandhi’s vision of nonviolent resistance are also powerful viral memes.

In a human life, anything that one does or says, demonstrates or communicates to others, may become a seed.  An artist plays with perception, expression, ideas, experience, and desires, and shares the products of this play with others.  An image, an idea, or a feeling thus communicated may connect with the receiver on a deep level.  Whether it stays in the memory or in the unconscious, it may later affect the receiver’s actions or thinking in some way.  At this point the seed is sprouting.

Elaborating on the metaphor, we could say that we are always scattering seeds.  Anything we say or do could be a seed.  Most of our deeds will amount to nothing, but occasionally something will take root.  We can’t know which of our actions or words will sprout, but we should be aware that some will.  We can’t check to see what is growing – the process of development begins in obscurity, and digging up a seed to check on its development may halt that development.  We should act as though everything we do is a seed of goodness, and we should let go of everything we do, trusting that the unpredictable process of the world will nourish and grow some of them.

Vortex, 2011, by Fred Hatt

Real change takes root over long periods of time, cumulatively growing from innumerable such seemingly insignificant experiences and actions of vast numbers of people.  This way of producing change through seeds requires faith.  One doesn’t seem to be changing or moving anything, and often doesn’t even perceive the invisible reactions that may show that the seeds are sprouting.  The power of this way of producing change lies in its invisibility, because since it seems to be nothing it provokes no reactionary counterpunch.

While artists may often engage in direct efforts to change people’s minds, even art which has no outwardly apparent political or intellectual content may be planting seeds.  Some art which does not seem to be making any statement may be an exploration of pure perception.  Since the way people perceive the world alters the way they experience and interact with it, something which expands or alters someone’s way of perceiving something even in a subtle way may be a powerful seed for change.

The illustrations for this post are watercolor on paper,  11″ x 14″ or 28 x 35.6 cm.

"The Sea is the Body, the two Fishes are Soul and Spirit", engraving from The Book of Lambspring, by Nicholas Barnaud Delphinas, 1599, illustrator unknown

The Sages will tell you
That two fishes are in our sea
Without any flesh or bones.
Let them be cooked in their own water;
Then they also will become a vast sea,
The vastness of which no man can describe.
Moreover, the Sages say
That the two fishes are only one, not two;
They are two, and nevertheless they are one,
Body, Spirit, and Soul.
Now, I tell you most truly,
Cook these three together,
That there may be a very large sea

This is from the first plate of the 1599 publication The Book of Lambspring.  The excerpt from the text is translated by Arthur Edward Waite.  In Europe in the 16^th and 17th centuries alchemical craft and the Hermetic philosophy were expressed in “emblem books”, which consisted of series of often surreal images and baffling texts full of mythological and religious allusions, in which the language of chemical operations and that of spiritual transformation are inseparably alloyed.

The alchemical style comes from a pre-scientific era, when the study of Nature was called “natural philosophy”, and principles were described analogically rather than analytically.  The modern scientific method, with quantification and controlled variables and testable hypotheses, was just beginning to be developed.  It would soon prove far more efficacious than the old analogies, but the transition was not instantaneous.  Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most important figures in the development of analytical science, was also an alchemist and wrote extensively in the alchemical mode.

Three-headed monster in an alchemical flask, from "Splendor Solis", 1582, by Salomon Trismosin

Alchemical writings are deliberately confusing, to protect “secret knowledge”, which could include trade secrets of craftsmen as well as heretical philosophy.  I suspect the emblem books were intended to be used as teaching tools within an oral tradition.  Some of the weird images are not so far from the kind of thought-illustrations, such as Schrödinger’s cat, used by present-day scientists.

Nowadays we mostly lack the initiates who can explain alchemical writings and illustrations to us, but I’ve had a long fascination with these old riddling texts and strange pictures.  They emerge from deep study of the nature of material and spiritual transformations, and they retain the power to stimulate imagination and insight.  C. G. Jung adapted alchemical concepts to the methods of depth psychology, and alchemy has informed the work of many modern and contemporary artists, such as Anselm Kiefer.  After all, creative work cannot be reduced to a purely analytical approach, and thinking about it still takes place largely through analogy.

Resurrexit, 1973, by Anselm Kiefer

Let’s return from that tangent to the Book of Lambspring.  Its images are simpler and its way of speaking more direct than the typical alchemical style.  It consists of a series of animal images and an odd parable of a son reborn after being devoured by his own father.  It all seems to be based around the central idea of Hermeticism, that everything is in reality one thing, and that a process of separating and recombining can reveal this fundamental unity of the all.  (The entire text and illustrations are available here, it’s easy to read the whole thing in one sitting.)

The first division the book makes, and to which it returns again and again, is of our own being into three parts:  body, spirit, and soul.  The body is clear enough.  It is our physical being, our material aspect.  Mind and matter is a distinction that makes sense to us and that we still use today.

But what is the distinction being made between spirit and soul?  Let’s look at the words.  Spirit means breath, as in the root of respiration, inspiration, expiration and aspiration.  Most of the ancient languages describe spirit as breath.  In Greek the word for spirit is pneuma, in Hebrew ruach, in Arabic ruh. All of these words mean breath.   The concept is similar to the Chinese qi and the Sanskrit prana.  The salient characteristic of breath is that it is a current that moves through us but is not of us.  To live we must continuously take air in, and let it go.  It represents a vital force that flows through everything.  When we die, the breath stops moving through us, but it does not stop moving through the world.  It is energy and movement, universal and eternal.

The soul is anima in Latin, the root of animal and animated.  In Greek it’s psyche.  It’s nephesh in Hebrew and nafs in Arabic.  It is the self, the essence of a being.  It is personality, character, individuality.  It is the part of us that experiences the highs and lows of the human condition, and that relates to others through compassion.  Unlike the spirit, the soul is bound to the body.

Returning to our more modern distinction between mind and matter, then, is mind soul or spirit?  It is both.  The flow of experiences and sensations, the experience of time, the constant current of ideas and thoughts with which our intellects engage, are spirit.  All of these things exist independently of the individual, yet our lives consist of their constant coming and going.  Our particular tastes, our individual responses to experiences, the character we build through our struggles with the world, our memories and our achievements, are soul.  (Others may understand these terms differently; this is the distinction that speaks most clearly to me.)

But this is an art blog.  What does all this mysticism have to do with art?  For me, it informs my way of seeing things.  It’s an attempt to see multiple levels of reality together.  Since I’ve built my own creative process around figurative drawing, let’s see how this tripartite view of being would apply to drawing.

For me, a drawing of a living being must have body, spirit, and soul.  If it is missing any one of these aspects, it is an incomplete depiction.  There is nothing wrong with an incomplete depiction, of course.  Here are some lovely examples of such one-faceted images.

An anatomical illustration shows the structure of the body.

Torso, from "Livre du Pourtraiture" by Jehan Cousin, 1608

A gesture sketch depicts the energy of the body.

Gesture drawing by Bill Shelley, 2009

A caricature focuses on the individuality.

Frank Sinatra, by Al Hirschfeld, date unknown

I usually strive to get all three aspects, and to get them unified.  To me there is a magic that happens when all three of these aspects of the human can be seen harmoniously portrayed in a drawing.

Aimi, 2009, by Fred Hatt

I think a similar criterion could apply to other artforms.  A playwright, for instance, might try to convey the physical reality of a setting, the action of outside forces upon characters, and the individuality of their responses.

Remember the point of Lambspring is that these three aspects are really one.  Making the divisions reveals to us the underlying unity.

We can see similar three-part divisions in the Christian holy trinity, in the Ayurvedic gunas (sattva, rajas, and tamas), in the shamanic three worlds, and so on.  They’re all really arbitrary divisions of a continuum.

One particular continuum, the color spectrum, was divided into seven parts by Newton, into six by Goethe, into five by Munsell, and into four by Hering’s opponent process theory.  But the division by three has been most useful for practical methods of industrial color reproduction.  Three legs are just enough to make a stool stable, three dimensions just enough to give us space.  The number three has the power of simplicity and the beginnings of complexity.

Color wheels based on the divisions of Newton, Goethe, Munsell, and Hering, from left to right respectively

Dividing the whole helps us to move within its dimensions, to explore its facets and work with its qualities, and finally to restore its oneness.

All the illustrations in this post that are not my own work were found on the web, and clicking on the pictures links back to where I found them.

One of Annie Dillard’s great themes is learning how to see – a subject far deeper than it might initially seem.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard (1974)

“When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.

“It is still the first week in January, and I’ve got great plans. I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kid paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.”

Kimon Nicolaides writes with great passion about the art of drawing, and his approach is about a method of learning that helps you develop your own way of drawing, rather than about imparting his own tips and tricks, as most drawing instruction books seem to try to do.  Nicolaides would be the second thing I’d recommend to a beginner in life drawing study, after James McMullan’s excellent introduction to learning the art of drawing in “Line by Line“, his recent series of posts on the New York Times website.

The Natural Way to Draw, by Kimon Nicolaides (1941)

“YOU SHOULD DRAW, NOT WHAT THE THING LOOKS LIKE, NOT EVEN WHAT IT IS, BUT WHAT IT IS DOING.  Feel how the figure lifts or droops – pushes forward here – pulls back there – pushes out here – drops down easily there.  Suppose that the model takes the pose of a fighter with fists clenched and jaw thrust forward angrily. Try to draw the actual thrust of the jaw, the clenching of the hand.  A drawing of prize fighters should show the push, from foot to fist, behind their blows that makes them hurt.
. . .
“To be able to see the gesture, you must be able to feel it in your own body.  You should feel that  you are doing whatever the model is doing.  If the model stoops or reaches, pushes or relaxes, you should feel that your own muscles likewise stoop or reach, push or relax.  IF YOU DO NOT RESPOND IN LIKE MANNER TO WHAT THE MODEL IS DOING, YOU CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU SEE.  If you do not feel as the model feels, your drawing is only a map or a plan.”

If I had to pick one all time favorite book about the work of the artist, it might be Salvador Dali’s “50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship”.  This book is, in part, a hilarious parody of such classic handbooks of master techniques as Cennino Cennini’s “Il Libro dell’ Arte“, but its suggested techniques, while preposterous and described in overblown language by a supremely conceited madman, manage to convey a great deal of real nitty gritty craft knowledge, along with a sense of the odd mixture of discipline and calculated derangement that drives many of the great artists.

50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, by Salvador Dalí (1948)

“The apprentice’s Secret Number 22 is that of the drawing of the geodesic lines of his model.  Nothing will reveal itself more useful for the understanding of the mysteries of the nude figure than the knowledge to be derived from the assiduous practice of this method.  Preferably you must choose a plump model, the curves of whose flesh are as turgescent as possible.  The best poses for this are the recumbent ones.  You need a provision of strings of back cotton which have been previously soaked in lnseed oil to which venetian turpentine has been added, in a proportion of five to three.  these strings should be hung up the day before using them, so that they may drip off the excess oil, but without drying altogether.  Once the model is lying down in the pose which you desire you begin cautiously to lay the strings on the model’s body in the places where you wish a clearer indication of the forms.  the curve which these strings adopt will naturally be the geodesic lines of the surface which you want made clear.  You may then draw your nude, but especially these geodesic lines which, if they are in sufficient quantity, will suffice – even should you efface the nude – to imprint its absent volume.”

Qualia, the subjective aspects of experience, have become a major problem in the philosophy of mind.  For example, a physicist can tell you that different colors are simply different wavelengths of light, and that theory can be proven by experiment, but a difference of wavelength does not account for the very different impressions made on us by red and blue.  Wittgenstein was one of the first philosophers to tackle this subject.  This posthumously published book consists mostly of question after question about what we can know and what we should doubt.

Remarks on Colour, by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1978)

“‘The colours’ are not things that have definite properties, so that one could straight off look for or imagine colours that we don’t yet know, or imagine someone who knows different ones than we do.  It is quite possible that, under certain circumstances, we would say that people know colours that we don’t know, but we are not forced to say this, for there is no indication as to what we should regard as adequate analogies to our colours, in order to be able to say it.  This is like the case in which we speak of infra-red ‘light’; there is a good reason for doing it, but we can also call it a misuse.  And something similar is true with my concept ‘having pain in someone else’s body’.”

Josef Albers’ “Interaction of Color” is based on his course for artists, a series of experiments that powerfully demonstrate the relativistic nature of color perception.  There are many books for artists about understanding color, but none are as illuminating as Albers.

Interaction of Color, by Josef Albers (1963)

“Imagine in front of us 3 pots containing water, from left to right:
WARM        LUKEWARM        COLD
When the hands are dipped first into the outer containers, one feels – experiences – perceives – 2 different temperatures:
WARM (at left)                (at right) COLD
Then dipping both hands
into the middle container,
one perceives again
2 different temperatures,
this time, however,
in reversed order
(at left) COLD – WARM (at right)
though the water is neither of these temperatures, but of another, namely
LUKEWARM
Herewith one experiences a discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect called, in this case, a haptic illusion – haptic as related to the sense of touch – the haptic sense.
In much the same way as haptic sensations deceive us, so optical illusions deceive.  they lead us to “see” and to “read” other colors than those with which we are confronted physically.”

Here are a pair of classic books of art appreciation.  John Berger’s writings aim to expand the ways we think about the artwork we see.

Ways of Seeing, by John Berger (1972)

“Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is.  Even a reproduction hung on a wall is not comparable in this respect for in the original the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures.  This has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s own act of looking at it.  In this special sense all paintings are contemporary.  Hence the immediacy of their testimony. Their historical moment is literally there before our eyes.  Cézanne made a similar observation from the painter’s point of view.  ‘A minute in the world’s life passes!  To paint it in its reality, and forget everything for that!  To become that minute, to be the sensitive plate . . . give the image of what we see, forgetting everything that has appeared before our time . . . ‘  What we make of that painted moment when it is before our eyes depends upon what we expect of art, and that in turn depends today upon how we have already experienced the meaning of paintings through reproductions.”

About Looking, by John Berger (1980)

(On Grünewald’s Altarpiece)
“. . . the European tradition is full of images of torture and pain, most of them sadistic.  How is it that this, which is one of the harshest and most pain-filled of all, is an exception?  How is it painted?
It is painted inch by inch.  No contour, no cavity, no rise within the contours, reveals a moment’s flickering of the intensity of depiction.  Depiction is pinned to the pain suffered.  Since no part of the body escapes pain, the depiction can nowhere slack its precision.  The cause of the pain is irrelevant; all that matters now is the faithfulness of the depiction.  This faithfulness came from the empathy of love.”

Finally, recommended for artists’ models, artists that work with models, people that book models for life drawing classes or groups, or students that attend such groups, at this site.  This book is the real deal about the profession of modeling for artists:

The Art Model's Handbook, by Andrew Cahner (2009)