Caught unawares by the 19th century
I was ten years old in 1956 when my family moved from Lafayette, Indiana to the prairie sixteen miles east of Edmonton, Alberta. A year later I moved to the 19th century.
An old photograph from Indiana shows me dressed like a cowboy sitting in a sofa chair drawing cartoons. In Alberta I learned how to play hockey in the winter and use a long string to snag gophers in the summer. I liked to draw, so my mother enrolled me in Saturday morning classes at the Shepy International School of Art, a series of rooms along a second-floor hallway in an old tenement building in downtown Edmonton. Professor Alexander Shepy, who had emigrated to Canada from the Baltic States after World War II, presided as the Master in the grand European tradition, dressed in a blue smock and black plastic bow tie. Here art was valued as a craft that demanded work and study: you might possess talent, money or some other advantage of birth, but you learned your craft from Shepy. No one parachuted into watercolor class for a week or two of amusement. Because drawing trains your eye, everyone began with chalks. Then you graduated to watercolors and, after passing a mastery test of watercolor technique, you moved to the adult room and to oils, charcoal and clay sculpture. I was living on the Canadian prairies in the 1950s, but Saturday morning I was in Paris about 1880 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Up a flight of stairs and a right turn down a hallway past several rooms where women looked up from their sewing. Just where the hallway floor sagged you began to notice the smell: generations of students had splashed the floor and walls with turpentine. The children's room was the first room on the right where beginners sat at small desks laboring with chalks and watercolors. To show his allegiance to Canada, Shepy had painted a portrait of Queen Elizabeth on the far wall. I did my first chalk drawing, a squirrel sitting on a tree branch, right under the nose of Queen Elizabeth II.
Along the hallway to the left was Shepy's office, a small fortress of European culture, art books and prints. During my five years as a student, I was in his office only twice. The first time I stared at the heroic Greek statue on the corner of his desk that had been knocked to the floor during an evening soiree and was now reconstructed with shatter lines and glue streaks. Shepy announced that I was ready to move up to the painting room. He gave me a wooden paint box with three brushes (two stiff hog hair brushes and a sable blending brush), his choice of oil paints (white was always zinc white and red was always rose madder) and an oval wooden palette. Carrying my paint box, I followed him into the painting room where he pointed to the second easel on the right-hand side, near the door. I was twelve years old and had arrived at last; I was about to become a painter.
The star of the class was an older teenager who wore a black leather jacket. He was busy doing a charcoal portrait of a gas station attendant (big angular jaw, smile, prominent cheek bones and a cap with a brim). I watched him create shade effects and then pierce the shade with a sharp black line, yet all I could see in his hand was a shapeless chunk of charcoal. Reaching clay sculpture meant that you had spent years mastering the various disciplines. There was a young woman who had matriculated that far and who breezed into our class about midday Saturday, saying hello to everyone and taking her sculpture out of a cupboard. Since our easels were nailed to the wall, the older students walked the row behind our backs, encouraging us but also pointing to messy patches in our paintings. Occasionally technical obstacles were negotiated: one day the sculpture lady lifted a canvas off an easel and judged the thickness of the paint by examining the canvas edge wise. I had never seen anyone do that and felt intimidated in this environment of highly charged craft expertise.
Near the end of our class Shepy circled the room and visited with each of us, critiquing our work. I stood up and he sat in my chair to silently examine my drawing. He would hold my pencil at arm's length to judge the lines and proportions of the model, and then mark my bad lines by putting two lines like these // over my wrong ones. Here is a description of how Jean-Leon Gerome (French academic painter, 1824 - 1904) interacted with his students :
The reporter noted that Gerome visited the atelier to review the students' work regularly, twice a week, an exceptional diligence among the atelier professors. He examines the work of each student with the greatest care, but also with the greatest severity. He doesn't flatter. You don't await an encouraging word from him unless it is really merited. On the other hand, one can often hear, "that's bad, that's not it", as he walks past the academies [drawings after a nude model]. He never laughs. He smiles rarely, and his smile is more ironic than benevolent. You can't tell his favourites among the pupils, for he treats them all alike. This severity and this coldness do not hurt him at the Ecole, he is the master, the most loved and the most obeyed. (2)
Eager to graduate out of watercolors and move up to oil paint? Take a piece of watercolor paper and use a ruler to draw a tall rectangle three inches wide and nine inches tall. Prepare three pools of primary colors: red, yellow and blue. Begin laying pure red at the top of the rectangle, sweeping from side to side, but never going beyond the edge of the rectangle. Next, dilute the red and introduce yellow; this will create orange. Then introduce more yellow until at the middle of the tall rectangle there is a band of pure yellow. Now dilute the yellow and introduce blue; this will create green. Then finally, add more blue until at the very bottom of the rectangle there is a band of pure blue.
Go outside the rectangle, do it again.
If the band of pure yellow is not in the middle of the rectangle, do it again.
If there isn't enough orange, do it again.
If there isn't enough green, do it again.
At first I could hardly control the brush to keep the color within the sides of the rectangle. Even more difficult was the challenge of merging and balancing the color bands. Ruined attempts began to pile up. Draw more rectangles, but don't rush because a badly drawn rectangle negates everything. Mix more paint and get the intensity of the color just right. Now keep trying. A week later I got my first good one and then I mastered it; I could produce good ones with ease. Shepy looked over the half dozen perfect ones scattered on the table. I was ready to move on.
To our modern sensibilities, this watercolor skill test seems like a lurid punishment from a Dickens novel, especially if you happen to be a digerati who can engineer a three-color gradient with your favorite digital editor in about one minute: select the rectangle icon and then drag your mouse across the drawing surface to create a perfect rectangle any size you like, click to fill the rectangle and select linear gradient and then choose your colors. Move the little arrows along the color-picker slider to situate the color bands of red, blue and yellow. It's that easy.
But it also completely misses Shepy's point because he wasn't interested in three-color gradients. He was testing my mastery of mind, eye and hand over paper, brushes, color, line and stroke. His test recognized a very deep truth: painting demands the control and exploitation of breakdowns, in a Heideggerian (6) sense, that occur when the tool in your hand does something unexpected and demands your attention. The stroke-by-stroke psychological reality of painting is responding to an unremitting series of breakdowns. In Shepy's test you swept your brush across the rectangle and immediately had to assess the width, the wetness and the color ... breakdown!... because your next stroke had not only to adjust to the facts on the paper, but extend them in width, wetness and merging color ...breakdown! ... and with any stroke, at any moment, you might crash because you couldn't adjust to the multiple breakdowns occurring simultaneously. Genius painters respond well to breakdowns and even exploit them for novel effects; lesser painters are overwhelmed. Painting is all about handling breakdowns effectively.
This morning I was painting the portrait of a young lady and had defined her eye lid with a thin dark line. I placed in some lighter skin tone as the flesh of her eye lid and in doing so obscured the dark line...breakdown! ... In re-painting the dark line of the lid, I used a tone that was more purple than my original dark line ... breakdown! ... I stood back and contemplated both eyes and judged the effect of the purple. I decided to keep it, but for balance had to add purple to the shadow where the eye inserts against the nose. The brush I was using was too big for this effect and narrowed the bridge of her nose ... breakdown! ... I widened the bridge of the nose with a light tone, but this reduced the contrast against the very light-colored tip of her nose ... breakdown! ... and so it goes, in a constant stream of breakdowns, judgments, reconsiderations, more breakdowns, further evaluations, etc. That one eye is more purple-colored than the other will prove to some viewers that I'm an incompetent painter, while others will delight in my use of color. The color sense of most people is so undeveloped that they won't even notice.
By contrast, eliminating breakdowns is the goal of software engineering. Engineered products that break down are commonly regarded as failures, examples being boats that sink and airplanes that fall out of the sky. The conceptual structure of digital visual editors is expressed in computer algorithms, sets of instructions that the computer, the digital drawing program, the image editor, the photo editor, etc. all follow exactly. This conceptual structure is inherently deterministic; that is, computer algorithms can't produce any result not explicitly (or implicitly) in scope. No software engineer, especially one with ambitions of large product sales, would include the possibility of an unintended breakdown in scope because rogue software creates fear, and fear of software reduces sales of software.
Input parameters to a computer algorithm determine its behavior, thus the line tool draws lines, obediently - mechanically - following the steps of its algorithm. I can ask thirty students to choose the line tool and begin at certain XY coordinates and end at other XY coordinates. Thirty people will produce the identical line because thirty algorithms have received identical inputs. If everyone selects the same color yellow, thirty people will produce identical yellow lines. Everyone can then apply a gaussian blur and the result is thirty identical, smudgy yellow lines. To introduce variety, each student could invoke some random numbers algorithm to generate an arbitrary gaussian blur. Now we have thirty different-looking, smudgy yellow lines, but each one could be reverse engineered by deducing its random number and then applying the other input parameters. The products of algorithms are by nature predictable and, given identical inputs, reproducible. These yellow lines are mechanical.
After the class, I sit at my desk and select a sheet of paper and a yellow chalk. I begin drawing a yellow line and immediately notice that this particular piece of paper is slicker than I had anticipated ... breakdown! ... I adjust the pressure of my stroke, which means that I have now committed myself to producing a yellow line that exhibits at least two pressures ... breakdown! ... and then unexpectedly, this particular piece of chalk responds to its internal dynamics of cohesion and breaks into two pieces and I draw a sharp squiggle ... breakdown! ... I continue drawing, but with the newly exposed wider surface, which produces a thicker line ... breakdown!... My ambition is to smudge the yellow line with my thumb, just as I did yesterday, but I notice that the skin on my thumb is rougher today than yesterday ... breakdown! ... and there is more oil on the surface of the skin of my thumb today ... breakdown! ... and in the early afternoon my hand shakes ... breakdown! ... and so on. The yellow line that I draw is a human artifact of that moment, those materials, me. It is not mechanical, not predictable and not reproducible. Tomorrow I could draw another yellow line, but I can't duplicate this particular yellow line.
Lifting my hand and studying the yellow line, I realize that the surprising squiggle suggests a figure that I had not anticipated a moment ago. The multiple breakdowns I experienced in drawing a single yellow line have thrown me into a maelstrom of unanticipated effects of line width, line pressure, line shape, line formation, all of which challenge my ability to handle breakdowns, provoke my creativity and, as I continue drawing, lift me off in pursuit of the novel, the unexpected, the creative.
Achieving unexpected, creative novelty with software is much more difficult because a machine can't escape its fundamental engineering paradigm. Manipulating a bit field is the purpose of a visual editor which excludes - this would really be an unexpected novelty - the ability to prepare a piece of buttered toast. A coffee machine brews coffee, but can't manipulate a bit field, and so on. The tools we use to express our creativity have profound consequences: put combat boots on a ballerina and dance is affected.
Any machine that I place before my eye such as a telescope, microscope, periscope or camera, reduces both the amount and variety of visual stimuli in order to construct its special scoped view. A camera is a machine with a lens manufactured to industrial specifications that bends light and constructs images with digital image sensors that fragment light with alternating rows of red-green and green-blue filters. By contrast, the human eye is an organic device evolved to be sensitive to light and is not manufactured to any standards, nor submitted to any quality control check before being put into use. Human vision can be distorted by disease, trauma, and congenital conditions. One reason painters paint differently is that they see differently. One source of creativity in painting is breakdowns, and they derive from the organic nature of painters themselves.
A bowl of blackberries in the lap of a two-year old child is a more powerful creative tool than any camera or digital editor. She will stick her hand in the blackberries and squeeze red juice between her fingers. She'll use the red juice to paint her high chair, her bib and then, in an unanticipated burst of creativity that smashes all paradigms ...breakdown!... put a hand print on a wall. Twenty-five years later she'll use a visual editor that will restrict her creativity to manipulating a bit field and homogenize her creativity to the predictability of a mechanical gaussian blur of a yellow line. If she continues to express her creativity through these tools, she constrains her creative potential to the limited range of their engineering paradigms. She could release her creative potential by pausing on the way home from work to purchase a yellow crayon and some blackberries.
Making something by hand is an opportunity to learn about yourself and the world. Pioneers, who homesteaded the prairies and found themselves in need of a chair had to use their minds to conceptualize "chair-ness," their eyes to both critically and aesthetically judge their work in progress, and their hands to fashion wood into a new object. A faulty plan or a botched execution left them without a chair, forcing them to do it again and again, until they succeeded. Every successive effort was an invitation to experiment and learn. Buying a chair teaches me about my role as a consumer in a market economy. Making a chair from my own design teaches me about myself, what "chair-ness" means to me, about my tools, and about the nature of wood. The product of my labor gives me not only a place to sit, but a sense of empowerment. When I tell others what I've learned, I pass along craft wisdom just as Shepy passed the craft wisdom of painting to me during the mid-20th century.
In the 1950s my father bought a Land Camera that used pack film; you snapped the photo and then pulled the film out of the camera and watched the image develop. I carried his camera with me about the frozen sloughs where cattails were banked with snow. I developed the film inside my shirt against the warmth of my body. Heat and cold affected the film developing process; I experimented and produced images of the prairies with arbitrary colors such as green snow.
My younger brother watched me set up my easel and pin my Polaroid to the wall. So began an appreciation of the difference between photography and vision - the Polaroids had their own color dynamics and were nothing like I had seen with my eyes. I sat at the end of my bed, looked at my brother who watched me with concern, and considered the aesthetic problems of copying it (the photograph) or recording it (the prairie slough) or perhaps painting the slough from memory by using the photograph as an aide memoire, or perhaps obsessively painting the image produced by the Polaroid, thereby making a painting that looked like a Polaroid photograph of a slough. I was fifteen and had a lot of dicey aesthetic problems to negotiate in the relationship between painting and photography.
The vast majority of Americans in the 1950s, however, didn't regard instant photography as just an excuse to make another painting. They were thrilled to capture an image so quickly and easily. In fact, these practical folks would have questioned the necessity of doing any painting since a portable instant camera could produce a picture of the slough in a minute. What is the point of struggling to learn to draw when a camera could do your work for you? If photography antiquates drawing, shouldn't the Shepy International School of Art have reframed itself as a provider of cultural amusement and encouraged dilettantes to parachute into watercolor class for two weeks of messing around? And after these new watercolor painters had satisfied their need for cultural amusement, they would have bundled up against the cold and passed a newspaper vendor along the snowy streets of Edmonton displaying Life Magazine that suggested that "the greatest living painter" was simply pouring paint out of a can onto a canvas on the floor.(5) There probably isn't a do-it-yourselfer in America who hasn't bungled the opening can of paint and splashed paint all over the garage floor. That's what Pollack appeared to be doing. The difference, however, was that his paint splashes were in Life Magazine and yours were in your garage.
Ease was the message received by the general public by such conceptual and methodological challenges to painting. It was easy to produce an image with a camera and it was easy to create art by pouring paint. In the 1950s you no longer had to work up a sweat to be a painter. Modern life had made painting by hand rare and obscure, an obsolete practice done with great difficulty by the old fashioned to produce a picture of a prairie slough that didn't even look "good;" that is, something that looked photographed.
1949 - Life Magazine publishes an article "Jackson Pollock: is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" (5) Photographed in action, Pollock drips and pours paint onto a canvas rolled out on his studio floor.
January 13, 1962 - The Saturday Evening Post publishes the cover painting "The connoisseur" by Norman Rockwell. This painting portrays an older gentleman standing in front of a large abstract expressionist painting, suggesting that the average American is bewildered by modern painting. This visual joke is presented in Rockwell's homey and near photographic style, which clashes ironically with the abstract expressionist painting portrayed.
1990 - Photoshop is introduced and suddenly digital images can be altered in limitless ways including transformations that mimic pencil, chalks or water colors and so on.
2006 - The Photoshop Fine Art Effects Cookbook for Digital Photographers (3) gives a step-by-step procedure for creating images in the style of the world's greatest artists. One formula provides a procedure for producing a digital image that simulates Van Gogh's sunflowers (p. 130). I teach a class on web design and show a class of forty-one students how to do a digital Van Gogh.
2010 - DeviantART (http://www.deviantart.com/), a online gallery with approximately 15 million members, introduces Muro, a HTML 5 tool for digital drawing. To promote Muro, a drawing contest is announced and deviants respond: "Just over 4 days later, deviants posted around 600 comments, with about 300 being contest entries." (4)
Each morning, as I eat my breakfast, I log on to my deviantART website to check for new comments and additional viewership of my images. I pay for a Premium membership, but am still exposed to advertisements informing me that I can buy a T-shirt displaying the deviantART logo. Points are available (80 points cost one dollar) that I can purchase and then give to other deviants as tokens of admiration. I can leave comments on their web pages. To lubricate the social aspects of deviantART, an emoticon called a llama (the South American camel-like animal) was introduced on April 1, 2010 and within two days 1,911,942 llama icons had been distributed by 414,940 deviants. (7) I count the number of llamas that I've received and feel inadequate if other deviants have received many more. (Does that mean that they're better painters?) An underground market in llamas develops where I can trade for llamas to adorn my site. Alternatively, I could join a covert group of mutual llama givers and in that way bulk up my llama total. This is addictive social media for artists and I'm hooked.
The social landscape of deviantART is balkanized into thousands of groups based on shared interests, iconography, technique, language, geography and so on. At the present moment I'm a member of more than twenty groups such as #FranceOfficiel, #Nature-Lovers, #All painters, #Traditional deviants, #Elite artists, #Illustrasyon [sic], and so on. If I wished, I could start my own group and so plunge into a competition for members in the struggle to become a high-status, prominent Super Group. Super Groups enjoy special website display advantages from the deviantART web servers, but tax their members to maintain their special status:
...I direly need your help to maintain the Super Group status of our group. For the moment, it costs $59.95 or 4,796 points to be a Super Group for a year. And this is just for a limited time. After that, it will be $120 or 9,600 points.
The psychological payoff of joining a group is the feeling of acceptance and achievement (see! this proves that I'm an artist!) when one of your images is accepted. The gate keepers who select images for the group might be founding group members, group administrators, or perhaps anyone with the spare time to wade through thousands of candidate submissions.
An Admin votes over submissions and comments the rejected ones providing a few words of useful critique. He also votes over join requests and sends Group Invitations to fellow illustrators who haven't already joined. The whole thing takes about 40 minutes a week, so we need people who visit DeviantArt at least once a week, have positive energy and who will be able to treat this like good fun rather than a boring duty.
Occasionally a more old fashioned issue such as "quality" arises. An administrator of one of my groups admonished us about the quality of our submissions and the need to "show effort." I e-mailed her inquiring what this means. (Her deviantART website described her as a 19-year old female from Toronto, but since deviantART exists in unverifiable cyberspace, "she" could be anyone from anywhere.)
I'm happy to answer your questions, just keep in mind, that I am by no means a professional artist, or anything of the sort. This is just my opinion and experience, being an art hobbyist, and admin to several active groups. ... [One group she administers] doesn't have any quality standards, so anyone can submit pretty much anything (except for a photograph) of an original character, and it will be accepted into the group. The only problem is that because of this, we get a TON of submissions every few hours. We accept pictures if they are submitted to the right folder, and sift through these submissions later to pick out anything that we feel should be moved elsewhere pretty much based on whether or not the picture is coloured, and whether or not it looks like it could have been done in 2 minutes by a 5 year old. Even if an artist is just starting out, and they haven't a clue about anything (anatomy, medium use, etc) but they still submit a picture that is fully coloured, even if it might be by grinding a pencil crayon into paper, then that means they're showing effort...
With digital art, it's a bit harder, because it's easy for someone to submit a messy sketch that they added a pattern or something to, for a background or some visual interest, so with digital art, it can more more about aesthetics. If a picture looks pretty, even if it is just a sketch or lineart, we can assume that the artist put in some effort...
I assume that the majority of the members don`t look through every single drawing, or possibly don`t have the group `watched`at all. There is just too many pictures to go though. As an admin, I manually accept or deny each and every picture, and all I have time to do (while juggling a full time job) is glance at the thumbnail.
I uploaded this image to my deviantART website four days ago and it has been viewed 83 times and downloaded three times. Given that it is possible to screen grab any image presented by your web browser, it is impossible to know how many copies / versions / alterations / expropriations of this image currently exist in the unknowable recesses of cyberspace. By posting this image online, I have in effect given it away. To date, nobody has bothered to buy a print of the image.
The virtual world of deviantART blurs with reality as deviants voyage from real space to cyberspace, back and forth, as if paint on canvas and arty electrons inhabit one seamless universe. Most digital devices - your web browser and my web browser - have not been color coordinated and therefore don't inhabit one seamless color universe.
When you work with the colors in a graphic, you are actually adjusting numerical values in the file. It's easy to think of a number as a color, but these numerical values are not absolute colors in themselves-they only have a color meaning within the color space of the device that is producing the color. (1)
A deviant comments my painting of La ville d'Ornans (above): "Love this! But I think you could do more contrast between houses and snow".
The real object: The painting hangs on the wall of my living room and its appearance is a factor of the time of day and the light in the room. I painted it with latex paint on a canvas board.
The numbers in a digital file: I photographed the painting (color shift one?) and uploaded the digital image to Photoshop (color shift two?). I cropped the image and then adjusted its look with the Brightness and Contrast tool (color shifts three and four?). I uploaded it to deviantART, which given the task of storing half a billion images must use a compression algorithm (color shift five?). My deviantART critic downloaded it to his web browser (color shift six?). What possible meaning can his critique of the colors of the snow have? Does it he have a strong light shining on his monitor screen (color shift?), is he color blind in some way (color shift?). Have we plunged head long into a digital irreality having lost the distinction between a painting and a bitmap? Does my critic think that the bitmap actually represents the real painting? Has the vortex of arty electrons of deviantART obscured the reality of the painting hanging on my living room wall?
Or, does this indicate my personal rupture with the 21st century? I stand before my easel with brush in hand, but I should be constructing a bit map? I trade paintings with other painters, but now I should upload/download bit maps? Instead of surrounding myself with art I love, I should fill a flash drive with bit-map files?
My own painting craft repertoire, based on Shepy's legacy, grows with my years of experience. Visit my studio and I could show you the wooden table I use to support a sheet of glass that I use as a palette. I lay my oil paints out in a counter-clockwise crescent with white and black to the lower right. Earth tones are next, then at least two yellows and usually five oranges and reds and then three blues. I mix all my other colors such as purples and greens. Suppose you wanted to do a portrait, I could show you how to set out oranges, ochers, yellows and reds and then a touch of cobalt blue. I use a palette knife with white to smear through the colors to produce a series of hues and tints for skin tones. That's 19th-century craft.
I compose images on parchment tracing paper using soft pencils. After many preliminary lines and erasures, a shadow film of carbon builds up on the parchment so that I can use an eraser to sculpt out light points. In this way my line drawing becomes three dimensional. That's 19th-century craft.
I can show you how to build a wooden frame with corner clamps and stretch raw canvas. One of the most magical moments of painting is soaking the raw canvas with gesso and water to shrink the canvas to a flat painting surface. I can coach you on the feel of the gesso surface to determine the exact surface you want to use, whether you intend to use a wet, watercolor-like treatment, or a more scrumbled treatment with thicker paint. That's 19th-century craft.
The first Thursday of every month there is a Seattle Art Walk in Pioneer Square. There are a few older painters who work in oils or acrylics, but we are vastly out numbered by folks showing digital products. I meet a young art student who is attracted by some boat pictures I'm showing. He asks me about my drawing technique, and he tells me that he's always liked to draw, even as a boy. He reminds me of the old photograph of myself sitting in a sofa chair in Lafayette, dressed up like an Indian, and drawing cartoons. I tell him about my techniques for drawing and building an image, but then he tells me that, at his school, drawing class is held in the computer classroom. It turns out that he isn’t learning how to use pencils, charcoal or chalks. He wants to show me his drawings and wants my opinion of his drawing skills. He takes his computer out of his backpack and turns it on.
References
1. "About colors in digital graphics" Adobe Community Help. Using Illustrator CSS (last updated 2/25/2010): p. 115.
2. Ackerman, Gerald M. The life and work of Jean-Léon Gérôme with a catalog raisonne. Sotheby's Publications, 1986.
3. Beardsworth, John. Photoshop Fine Art Effects Cookbook. O'Reilly, 2006.
4. DeviantART blog. Posted Tuesday August 17, 2010. http://hq.deviantart.com/blog/
5. "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" Life Magazine, August 8, 1949.
6. Koschmann, Timothy, Kari Kuutti and Larry Hickman. "The Concept of Breakdown in Heidegger, Leont'ev, and Dewey and Its Implications for Education." Mind, Culture, and Activity 5 (1), 1998.
7. "Let's Play Llama Trading Game!" A deviantART announcement. http://hq.deviantart.com/blog/31326194/