About Perception

I am always surprised to see how the ways of different artists differ from one another and how each one expresses a different experience. The aesthetic experience cannot be grabbed or defined, but  will rather strike and transform the persons who are searching for it. You sense enthusiastically where the education of fine arts will lead you, and on this hunch I want to write the following lines suggesting a path that sometimes seems to merge with the target itself, since it gives profound joys in spite of the imperfect artistic result.

 

Three approaches concerning perception :

 

We want to learn how to draw and express ourselves, and then you realise that the only thing you can learn and teach is to know how to see. All teaching-methods train the attention to the gesture by fulfilling the potential of perception. I find it useful to distinguish three complementary approaches to painting and its training to better understand how it forms an integral part of our humanity.


 1. The abstractl vision –  2. The figurative structures – 3. The body and the breath – Conclusion


The abstract vision    |      Back to top top

Drawing develops in us a capacity of pure visual perception that is sometimes called "right-brain vision 1 ". The achievements of this perception require a solfeggio practice to get a good eye. This draughtsman Solfeggio consists in transferring through a process of abstraction away from concepts, the space that we see in three dimensions, on an imaginary two-dimensional plane. This plane must be thought as transparent and as situated between one-self and the subject. It is on this plane, that one can take measurements, angles and visual perpendicularities (aplombs) that will structure the drawing.

Everything is here thought as being flat (aplats 2). All the volumes are connected with each other by the measurements. Our perception becomes global and covers the composition, outlines, volumes and visual contrasts: the full and empty foremost, straight and crossing lines, curves and reverse curves and the values,  the clear-obscures witch again lead us to painting and its multiplied colourful contrasts: Lights and shadows, warm and cold shades, pure and broken, transparent and opaque ...

Art education (but also the attendance of any art) teaches us to detach ourselves from the represented object, which is so psychologically and intellectually interesting, and to give all forms - object, emptiness and shadow - the same importance. Painting is no more about representing "what we know" or "what we like", but about representing "what we really see" and what we see are really abstract forms. Abstraction is then recognized as an integrated part of the figurative representation and from this perspective we can feel the same joy by drawing beautiful peonies as some cans.



The figurative structures     |      Back to top top

This shift from 3 dimensions to 2 dimensions allows to approach the figurative drawing with detachment and openness. But detachment is not enough. It is also good to find a personal and tangible relationship with the subject. The basis of morphology, the rules of perspective and all the practical and theoretical knowledge relating to drawing remain a key tool in structuring our imaginations. With these tools we are better able to see and understand what we see or even to draw from our imagination scenes and spaces created from scratch but coming from the real

These bases also allow us to have a better understanding of for example Cézannes artistic approach, who always tried to make us feel all the dimensions of an object. They allow us to visualize in our imagination and in three dimensions, what we draw in two dimensions and to give presence and volume to the represented object.

The interpretation of the artist is somewhere situated between these two poles: He looks at an object as it was the first time he saw it, and at the same time he understands it  and gives him a chosen form.



The body and the breath     |      Back to top top

The artist is somehow a craftsman who likes to work on a raw material that inspires him or wherein he finds a soul. This artwork has its natural foundation in the human body itself, where an intimate union between matter (or a raw material) and spirit takes place.

Our body is naturally inhabited by a breath, which establishes a continuous interaction between the inside and the outside. It is linked to our subconscious - we breathe without thinking about it - and our awareness - we can turn our attention to it. It can be activated voluntarily or involuntary. The breath that do evokes artistic inspiration, teaches us something valuable when we are attentive to it without seeking to control it voluntarily. It teaches us about the inner qualities:

                          Rooting, openness, detachment, receptiveness, perception and passivity

Our relation to breath and to the body has implications for art education. While painting, for example, it is good to think about emptying the arm, the hand or even the intention, to let the emergence of a free inhabited gesture come to you from behind. - Standing, while painting, makes it possible to extend the arm and install a greater physical distance between oneself and the work, which again promotes an inner detachment from the work. - Be aware of fact that the contact of the brush with the canvas enriches the line and the stroke - Breathing consciously helps you to feel the rhythms, the full and the emptiness, together with the breath of the work and thus its composition.

One could perhaps say that the faculty for art of "contemplation, depends on the quality of a incarnated and receptive visual perception. Breathing carefully makes one present to the body and the senses, and our ability to "see" is therefore awakened. And yet, the line drawn, which is good, is the one first seen from the inside in the faculty of imagination.



Conclusion     |      Back to top top


There are no absolute rules in painting and you can see artists follow a path contrary to common sense with success. It is commonly thought that drawing have to be mastered before learning how to paint, and you will be surprised to see a Chardin (Jean Simeon) who apparently learned to draw by painting: The pastel portraits he made lately in his life are so superior to the few drawings that we have of him before he devoted his work to still life and oil! But it is a false exception, because drawing training tends to educate the perception, and Chardin simply had his perception educated by painting.

Nonetheless most of us have the feeling that artistic liberty comes with the mastery and that the work on “letting go” becomes so much more interesting when the acquisition of the classical basics of the fine arts structures our work in a subjacent manner.

Modern art has turned upside down the understanding of art in this respect. This century teaches us every day that other paths complementary to those of pure solfeggio can be followed. The body is the big winner of this modern epic. Listen to our own body to remain consciously in it (to in- abitate it) makes the creative act a quest, which is also a quest of self-knowledge that opens up to new creative forms emerging from deep intuition. With modernity a certain spirit of childhood did grasp the artists and transformed the world of creation into a vast site of experience and discovery.

Working on the abstract perception of the structures and the basics of drawing (perspective, values etc.) develop in us an sensitization of our perception that becomes more incarnated and releases the breath of inspiration. I conclude by citing Cezanne: We need to become classics again, which means by the sensation ... You can feel it, learning to paint introduces on a two interdependent ways: firstly to a rich, fascinating and structuring tradition and secondly to the path of openness to novelty through receptivity, i.e. by open vision or perception.


1: About this subject, read the book by Betty Edwards : Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

2 :  Maurice Denis did express this idea as following :"Remember that a painting, before being a battle horse, a nude woman or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order."