Friday, August 29, 2014

Drawing to See Better

Drawing trains the eye to see better, to see precisely and systematically; and learning to see better is a benefit not just to aspiring artists but to everyone anywhere. 

Seeing better means seeing and experiencing what you see without the intervention of words.  Consider a simple line drawn with a chalk; to know what it really looks like is to see it; describing it in words never suffices.  No amount of words suffices to convey the shape of a vase accurately.  It’s the same with color; words for color, which the cosmetic industry tries hard to invent in labeling lipsticks, for example, are so broadly abstract that you never know the exact color until you see it.  The only way to shop for a blouse to match the skirt is to wear it or take it with you.   

Words are abstract and serve efficiently as a means of communication; but they are never accurate totally.  If you say  “a tall pear-shaped blue vase,” I get some idea of what it is; when you draw it, you are tracing with your hand what you see with your eyes and when you color it you are reproducing the effect of the color with the texture of the surface, and I understand it more precisely.  Drawing is the next best thing to seeing; and, moreover, drawing sharpens our perception and makes us see better.

Even when you are only drawing a line, nothing so complicated as copying an object but a simple line, you exercise the precision that words lack.  A line is a line is a line.  But when we draw a line, it can be straight, cursive, crooked, jagged, jiggly, thin, thick, wobbly, hesitant, nervous, bold, coarse, meticulous, etc.  But all these words are not quite as precise as the actual line drawn and perceived. Look at the drawings by Ingres and Rembrandt, Matisse and Georg Grosz, Saul Steinberg and William Steig.  For each line, the pencil may be held lightly, pressed hard, pushed or pulled, moved fast or slow; and the different media produce different quality in the line drawn: pencil, crayon, charcoal, pastel, pen and ink, brush and ink, etching needle, and engraver’s burin.

People who claim to have never drawn often say that they can’t even draw a straight line.  But you can draw a straight line if you can print your name.  You can draw a circle, if you can write the letter ‘O’.  Anyone who can write can draw; anyone who can write cursive letters can draw curves of all kinds. 

Looking at something and drawing it as faithfully as possible forces us to look and see it for the first time because we are so accustomed to just scanning them and giving them a verbal identification, that is, a "word" (to put it in a word).  Draw a leaf, and you are suddenly aware how complicated its form is.  Draw the effect of light on objects with light and shade; you see even more.  A glove has five fingers but it is not the same as the hand with five fingers, and they are both different from a gloved hand. We know they are different as expressed in words but when we draw them we know how exactly they are different.  That’s how drawing sharpens seeing.  Learning to apply colors is an advanced course in drawing. 

So, we draw and we see better.  But what’s is the good of seeing better?  It promotes a grasp of the world more quickly and accurately, that is, more efficiently.  There are certain professions in which a visual comprehension is inherent in it.  Believe it or not, better trained customs officers can "intuitively" read a suspicious faces, comportments, and luggage.  It is not really intuition; it is a training based on countless instances.  An art connoisseur (though they are unfortunately less trusted in the art world today), who detect forgeries, do the task instantaneously based on the long experience of having been exposed to hundreds of similar works.  An experienced physician in general practice reads symptoms by inspection for diagnosis; more recently, physicians rely on digitalized numbers and charts and reports of all kinds of "scientific" tests received back from the lab (and ignore obvious symptoms). Symptomatology is a branch of semiotics - the science of detecting meanings in a sign — visual or auditory markers. Interviewing a candidate in person (vs. via CV and phone conversation) tells more in five minutes about that person and her/his qualifications that reveal themselves less inaccurately verbally on paper or by phone. Such a visual understanding helps businessmen on all levels in judging their associates and clients; street vendors exercise their eyes both in buying and selling.  A skilled structural engineer, examining a drawing, can see whether or not a truss or a beam is under- or oversized without resorting to calculation. So, drawing enhances visual acuity and efficient judgment.  

Seeing without the intervention of words is what a preverbal child naturally does.  An immigrant arriving in a country without adequate preparation in the new language are, of necessity, more alert to and reliant on the facial, gestural, and emotional tenor of the people they observe and come in contact with, and the look of the townscape to deduce semiotically meanings for their understanding.  A fuller understanding of the world comes from this kind of more total visual experience without words. Drawing is the first step to recapture the “open mind” of a child, a mind that is nimble, unconstrained by verbalizing habit, that frees the mind ultimately ready for more creative thinking. 

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Blacks are brown, and so are Whites

Brown is not white, and brown is not black either.  If you look around and try to see the world with your eyes, you find that most people are brown. 

Most so-called blacks are more brown than black, and many so-called whites are lightly brown --tan, beige, milk tea -- as are many Southern Europeans. Latinos, to the Asian eye, are caucasian and, so, they are white even when they are brown.  Some blacks are Negroid in features but many African-Americans have caucasoid features as do Indians from India.  If you honor what you see with your eyes, unhampered by the categorical words, conventionally taken as descriptive, the world’s population falls largely in the brown ranging from light to dark. 

The racial conflict expressed as one between black and white is, then, a delusion resting on the long held misnomers and perpetuated by the Census Bureau which still insists on the categories black and white.

See also my Webbsie essay: Non-White. 

Faceless acrobats

Oliver Wainwright of the Guardian wrote about the Bridgewater Place in Leeds, a 32-story office and residential skyscraper completed in 2007, the tallest building in Yorkshire.  The critic addresses the problem of the violent wind tunnel it created on the street level and other examples of "killer towers."  The article prompted me this comment on contemporary skyscrapers. 

So many new buildings are not only horrendous to look at, and cheaply and dangerously constructed but also irresponsibly conceived.  They make us “wonder why modern buildings seem so out-of-sync with any nearby natural environment," as a friend wrote me.  They not only defy natural environment but built environment as well.  

It is easy to blame architects.  But buildings are paid for by their patrons; large corporations are commissioning tall and taller and more daring buildings in competition with one another. Killer towers are visible expressions of those corporate leaders in the notorious 1%,  dominating and oppressing and sneering at the small businesses crawling under their arrogantly towering bodies.  Not all towers are killers, of course, and not all new buildings are the product of corporate wealth and arrogance; but many are.  And with their money they hire architects from distant places instead of employing local architects, those who know the neighborhood firsthand and can produce designs that accommodate the surrounding physical environment.  Out of specific urban context, many new towers are also abstract without historical connections to the urban context. So, the towers all over the world from Turin to Timbuktu, Boston to Budapest, Shanghai to Shangri-La, all look the same.  

Time was when skyscraper were what distinguished New York from any other place.  Time was when Philadelphia adhered to the unwrit agreement that no new building will rise above the statue of William Penn, erected in 1894, by none other than Alexander Milne Calder, the father of the "mobile" Calder. It's also the corporate patrons who insist on the light, fragile, daring looks with the profile that seem to twist and twirl, swing and swirl, float and flirt, and architects, certainly also irresponsibly, answer the demands because they need the job.  Every city had its distinct character because a city is a layer of historical constructions, generation after generation, century after century, not just London, Paris, Rome, Prague, Stockholm, Katmandu, Rio de Janeiro, but Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and New York. Local color is fading everywhere, certainly already in many city centers, presenting a forest of glass towers, potential killers casting ominous shadows on low-rise local buildings.  

It is easy to blame the architects; but they are not the chief villains.  The sad reality is the ethos of the heartless, greedy entrepreneurs.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

All alone



It occurred to me that for my kitty Vif, now with me in my apartment for a year, the only other living creature in his life is me, a monster with a hairless face and fluttering cover on the body.  Little wonder he cavorts with me as though I am another cat.  I wonder if he remembers the other cats at the ASPCA he played with before I adopted him.  He will never see another furry cat for years to come, or or any quadrupeds, ever.  Poor Vif.  Does he see other cats in his dreams?  Or does he dream of more creatures like me?  

Friday, August 15, 2014

貪欲 - Greed

毎日一つづつ黄金(こがね)の卵を産むガチョウを飼っていたお百姓さん、金持ちになるに従って、堪えきれない欲が出て、お腹に入ってる卵を全部出そうと開いてみたら空っぽで、その上ガチョウは死んでしまった。これは、イソップ寓話の一つ。

一石二鳥の反対のことわざに、「あぶはちとらず」というのがありますけど、イタリア版は、Chi due volpi caccia, l’una per l‘altra perde です。

貪欲と権力は限りなく増長するもの。

隴(ろう)を得て蜀(しょく)を望む。これは後漢の光武帝の、隴を征服した後、蜀地方も攻めようとした部下をたしなめた言葉。取れば取る程欲は増す。権力もまた同じ。得れば得る程、限度を無視して権力を振り回すのが、浅ましや、これ人間の運命かな。


Friday, August 8, 2014

Charles James

Visiting Charles James: Beyond Fashion, dramatically installed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, I was tempted to retitle the show to read Charles James: Not Quite Fashion.  Certainly, he designed ball gowns for fashionable women, 15 of which occupy one large gallery, each with an analytical video showing how pieces of fabric are folded into the finished product.  But James was primarily and essentially a fabric sculptor, as he admits, but not really a dress designer, as he does not.  His thinking is sophisticated as amply demonstrated in his pronouncements about design, posted on the mirror walls on two sides of the large gallery.  But his visual sensitivity does not soar to the same level, hampered as he was by his understanding of the female body as he wanted it to be in his imagination.  As sculpture, his gowns are spectacular; downstairs in the Costume Institute, his more quotidian dresses, especially the coats, are little more than lackluster, none quite equal to the art of his mentors Poiret and Vionnet.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Vanishing Museums

Time was when art museums considered themselves guardians of art, bringing together the artistic heritage in safe-keeping under the care of the curator — the caretaker — and making the works accessible to those interested in seeing them with their own eyes.  Today major museums, in particular the famed ones, purportedly carrying on the same mission, have become promoters more intent on bringing in more visitors than seeing to that they look and see what they won’t find elsewhere. They allow the crowd the galleries to jostle and make seeing the works a big hassle.  Moreover,  the visitors, too busy snapping pictures of the works they no doubt want to own vicariously for viewing in reproduction back home, neglect looking at the actual works with their own eyes and cultivate the excitement of experiencing them firsthand; small scale replicas of masterworks are readily available nowadays on line, after all, and they capture the subject and the composition but only as a general idea, enough for identification but hardly sufficient for the understanding of the works. What is the point of visiting a museum in person unless we inspect and examine the displayed works in life — in their full dimensions, accurate scale, perfect palette, minute details, the traces of the artist’s hand in brushwork and texture, and sense of space as captured from the appropriate viewing distance.  Photography in museums, with appropriate exceptions, should be prohibited entirely to encourage visitors to look and see.  True, art should be made accessible to many democratically, but the museums must insist on educating the visitors to see the works.  Their directors today, however, too eager for volumes of visitors and the revenue they bring in, are much too often losing their museums for tourist attractions.  Alas.