Painting what you see from a single
viewpoint
But why from a single viewpoint? When I notice something I stop to look at it. It has always seemed to me that my way of looking corresponds to a series of single views, and I do not think they are views seen in the round- my visual experience does not correspond to the experience of free standing sculpture, when there is more round the other side than I expected. I believe I see in views of high relief, for instance the angle between the pavement and the houses is opened out more than 90°.
Also because it is the
particular relationships from a single view that are interesting. It is usually
from just somewhere that I am struck by what I see and nowhere else will do or
be the same. At once my position becomes significant, and the longer I stay
there the more important my position becomes. The subject holds me fast by
radiant lines to my eye like guy ropes to a tent pole.
One more reason is that it
is the only way I have found of making a representation of what I can see and
so being able to catch some indisputable facts that do not simply depend on my
opinions.
It is not easy to see. The
partiality of vision is well known. The selection of what is useful to see for
everyday life varies with each person. Some people hardly look at all. They use
a code of recognition similar to the abbreviations of recognition used by the
army- ‘all trees are fir trees or bushy topped’. Everyone has their sight
conditioned by every experience, not by any means just visual experience. We
are all prejudiced and very conservative in what we recognize from what we see.
It would anyway be impossible to get through everyday life if we looked at
everything. Few people are interested in looking at the actual appearance of
things and few painters are interested in the problem of painting what they see
in front of them.
Painters look at pictures, their own, fine art, coarse art, photographs, advertisements, everything, so what they choose to see is not only conditioned by their everyday rationalization, but includes their own aesthetic preference; it is likely that they only choose to paint what is paintable and what echoes their experience of paintings.
But if it is not easy to
see it is certainly more difficult to translate what you see into two
dimensions even from a single viewpoint. By this I do not mean a fixed stare, but
using the amount of scansion necessary to view the subject.
The picture starts off
uniquely. Each seems brand new and different from any other and the painter has
high hopes and an arrogant assurance of success. The paint looks beautiful on
the clean canvas and the subject looks innocent. One hopes to ride in like a
surf bather on a wave of enthusiasm, but the doubts come, are ignored, but
persist. The subject changes, wriggles clear and is inviolate and the canvas
looks like paint. The picture comes to a stop, the subject still looks
beautiful, perhaps in a different way, and the canvas looks like yet another of
one’s pictures- it is a moment of despair, when one understands the absolute
difference between the canvas, the horrible canvas and the beautiful thing one
sees. One has lost, so one casts about for anything, anything that will
establish a connection between the canvas and the thing one looks at.
I think it is possible to
establish some sort of elementary comparative similarity between the canvas and
the appearance of the subject. Looking at a window it may be possible to tell
whether it appears higher than it is long and it is possible to mark off on the
canvas two distances with this comparative similarity. So one builds up a
system of empirical proportions- the distances and intervals alike and unlike,
the same, greater or less. Each time one finds a new ‘position’ and its
corresponding ratio with what has gone before, so one more comparative fact has
been gathered from the subject and each is precious, particularly the ones of
absolute certainty- slowly the picture accumulates information, the like
distances and intervals make a rhythm which multiplies across the canvas. The
first distances become significant units and their length(in fact the first
distance) is the measure of every other position. The subject is still as
completely beautiful, the canvas acts like a ledger; the marks of interval
describe what has been found out. They are selective, but in so far as the
answers are correct they are outside the influence of opinion.
A number of positions can
be described by a line. The object can be seen in terms of a collection
reciprocal lengths. The lengths smaller or longer depending on the proportions
of the object, the distance away, and the angle they make to the eye. (It is
not easy to see the receding railway track as a near-vertical line.) The first
line on the canvas is qualified by the second and so is understood to be
longer, shorter or the same, and the lines of apparently the same length echo
each other. The lines have direction; they point in the same or different ways
implying movement that is halted or reinforced; they lie on the canvas and
their tilt and balance make an equilibrium with the rectangle. They may join
end to end to become an articulated line whose length is made from the sum of
the parts, they grow like a shoot into twigs and all the articulations are like
branches of one tree. Seen simultaneously the articulated line becomes a
character. The appearance of the object is translated into these characters.
The characters whose shapes depend on the viewpoint(because they do not exist
in the actual object) can, if made without mistake, lead to an unprejudiced
account.
If the articulated line
joins on itself it cuts off an area of the canvas. The area is described by the
lines like a field surrounded by hedges; the limits of a field may be described
by hedges, but the field is not the sum of the hedges and the shape is not the
sum of the lines. These shapes particular to your point of view have to be
identified as two-dimensional patterns so that they may be made on your canvas.
A rectangular tabletop cornerwise on becomes a diamond shape. When things are
placed on the table the top is obscured and new shapes are made. If the objects
overlap they lose their familiar outline: the side of a matchbox becomes a
yellow flag, piece of table a cooling tower, the arrises of the inkwell cranes
and signal arms, the half-seen dish a moon.
The shapes are juxtaposed
into an irregular mosaic. The adjacent shapes condition each other by their
common boundaries until they lock together and form a third shape that encloses
them both and is more than the sum of the two. The shapes expand, each
continually refined to accommodate the last, and the last by a series of
compound comparisons influences the appearance of the first. The shapes expand
until they add up to a description of the diamond-shaped tabletop. Some shapes
are more difficult to see than others- if the real-life shape is in elevation
then it is easier to translate it than if it is seen obliquely, like the
tabletop or a field. It is the oblique shape, the surface running away from the
canvas that is the difficulty. It is incompatible with the surface of the
canvas. In the translation one’s mind has to force the far boundaries forward
and the near surfaces back so that they can be comprehended in terms of their
optical appearance. Malevich’s picture of a single yellow plane receding into
infinity seems to me a marvelous illustration of the crisis of appearance. I
believe everyone is aware of this when they stand looking over the sea. The
impossibility of mentally tipping into elevation what we know to be a huge flat
area stimulates our appreciation of what a great distance we are looking over.
We are never more aware of how far we can see away from us than in the
absolutely flat parts of East Anglia; mountains which are landscapes in
elevation, do not so particularly stimulate our sense of distance. The single
viewpoint painter has to make the difficult imaginative effort to see the
horizon and foreground in the same plane, the plane the shapes occupy on the
canvas.
This particular
representation of the two-dimensional appearance constitutes and appreciation
of the three-dimensional form; far from projecting himself into the three
dimensions of the object, which is a way of reducing the object to what we
expect to find, this effort to see flat the three-dimensional object provokes
the sense of form by describing the difference found between the real-life
object and the canvas. These ways of coming to terms with the thing in front of
us depend on relative proportions. (With certain reservations these proportions
can be gauged with the help of a brush or pencil held at arms length and at right
angles to the line of sight.) The time
is spent exactly
co-ordinating the
proportionate lengths and intervals and directions. The marks are made again
and again until the pattern rings true, or as true as the painter can make it,
the actual look of the picture is determined by when the painter leaves off,
and often he does so for quite circumstantial reasons; the leaves fall off the
tree, the model cannot come any more. But the amount of contact that he manages
to correlate mainly depends on his own capacity; obviously great painters can
manage more than less great. The picture at first seems to go swiftly, but as
more information is gathered and brought to bear on what has gone before the
pace slackens off like a graph that first rises steeply, but as time passes
eases off until the curve flattens out and hardly advances against the time
spent. The changes get smaller but are as difficult to make. Like the tide
coming in, the waves go back and forth and it is often necessary to spoil what
is done before the painter can get further. Sometimes the wave goes out and
does not come back, but in any case the picture will never be finished. The
knowledge and selection from the appearance of the subject always changes and
there is no absolute solution. The picture does not stand for a reflection of
the object but for a prejudiced account- for the visible compound of
experiences and the efforts to translate them in front of the object.
