The drawing lesson

The drawing lesson that can be found in Chapter 10 of “Drawing with Feeling“, is the most important chapter in my book on the practice of drawing. All the other chapters either lead up to it or hinge upon it.

The key difference between the method described in this book is that it concentrates on training our capacity for getting a feeling for relativities of length, angle and position of lines drawn on the page. The method was developed on the basis of my research findings, when I was a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Stirling in Scotland. I was later to discover that, despite many superficial differences, my drawing lesson also has much in common with the core ideas of Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, the highly influential 19th century teacher. The big difference between his method and mine is that while he emphasises training the memory in a general sort of way, mine, with the advantage of knowing about important 20th century advances, emphasises the aspect of memory that deals with training the “feeling system“.

The drawing lesson in this chapter is a description of the one that I give to individual students. It usually takes about three hours of highly concentrated trial, error and in-depth explanation of why the error has been made. After it, almost everybody, no matter their original level of attainment, will find that they have taken a significant leap forward in their ability to draw from observation with accuracy. The leap forward for beginners is regularly spectacular and many, already skilful, professional artists have been impressed by the improvements in both the speed, accuracy and expressiveness achieved in their drawings from observation. Some idea of their appreciation can be obtained from the “exhibiting artists” section of the student comments page. In the next chapter it will be shown how students can build on what they have learnt and, as a result, make signifiant progress, both in drawings made from memory and in line-production speed.

While the drawing lesson and its follow-ups enable students to surprise themselves (and sometimes me as well) with the progress they make in one day, they will need to follow up with the exercises suggested in the next chapter and in various other places in this book. If they do so regularly, over a period of time, they will find themselves experiencing, over and over again, the advantages of a method that is centred upon the use of comparative looking, used as a tool for expanding awareness, and of the “sensing” of relativities, as a means of guiding line output. The reward will be an ability to create drawings, whether made quickly or slowly, that are enhanced by their new found and personalised, feeling-centred, information pick-up skills.

Converting a live drawing lesson into the written word has inevitable disadvantages, particularly when it is one that requires up to three hours of sustained concentration from both student and teacher. For this reason, however clear my explanations, Chapter 10 was never going to be an easy read. A consequence of this is that getting the most out of it may prove to be hard work. If it does, I hope that you will not let this put you off, for taking as much time as is necessary to understand and implement each and every step will be well worth the effort.

The centrality of feeling

The big differences between the method explained in this chapter and other methods are the emphases on:

  • Using accuracy as a way of extending awareness, rather than as an objective in itself.
  • Enabling liberation from widely taught methods that distance us from our feelings.
  • Sensing as a way of measuring spatial relativities (of size, length, orientation and position on the page).
  • Coordinating the information pick-up system with the organisation-of-action skills system to enable fast, information-rich results.
  • Opening up opportunities for “personal expression”, through exaggeration (Van Gogh, et al.), distortion (Toulouse-Lautrec, et al.) and feeling-connected mark-making (Bonnard, et al.)”.

Before attempting to follow the instructions in Chapter 10, it might be well worth revisiting Chapter 4The sketch and the feel system. There, beside elaborating upon what I mean by the “feel-system“,  I suggest a number of simple exercises to give you experience of using it.

CHAPTER 10 – THE DRAWING LESSON

 

Below you will find some images and, below them, some links to already published chapters from BOOK 1, “Drawing with Feeling” and from BOOK 2, “Drawing with Knowledge” , both from the two-book Volume that I have written on the practice of drawing: “Drawing on Both Sides of the Brain“.

 


Six rapidly drawn images in ink and pencil

Illustrating how feeling-centred, personal responses to a pose can be conveyed in the rapidly made drawings

 

Drawings of Putel

Cats doing what they do best: Creating eye-catching patterns of curvatures, and softening hearts, while lazing around

 

ink drawing of Katherine

Catching the energy of unplanned body positions that cannot be trusted to last more than a few seconds

 

Drawings of Helene

How simple lines can catch a fleeting expression or a chance pose that unexpectedly catches the eye

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INTRODUCTORY

VOLUME ONE : “DRAWING ON BOTH SIDES OF THE BRAIN”

BOOK 1 : “DRAWING WITH FEELING”

The chapters so far loaded:

BOOK 2 : “DRAWING WITH KNOWLEDGE”

The chapters so far loaded:

 


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The surprising eye in diagrams

The surprising eye

The eye is full of surprises. The biggest ones come from the structure of retina that is situated at the back of it. The purpose of this Post is to provide a link to images and explanatory captions that tell us more about this starting gate of visual processing. At first sight, much of what we find strikes us as bizarre. But, when we delve more deeply, we discover the considerable advantages of the way things actually are. It turns out that nothing would work nearly as well as it does, if things were arranged any differently. The images and their captions will go a long way towards explaining why.

In the process, they will help readers to get a better understanding of how the eye/brain combination makes practical use of the information contained in the ever-changing patterns of light coming into the eye.

The link to the diagrams

Click on the link below to access the images and captions referred to. They are extracted from ‘The Glossary‘ to the four volumes I am in the process of publishing on this website.

GLOSSARY DIAGRAMS (1)-THE EYE

 

What happens next

Upon leaving the retina, the neural signals travel in two directions. Some go up the optic nerve to the region of the neocortex known as ‘Visual Area 1′. Others take a completely different route that makes contact with the regions of the “Old Brain”. These play a central role in visual perception as we experience it. For example, they play their part in eye movements, spatial awareness, affective responses, multimodal processing, whole-field relations and much besides. Images and captions relating to both these routes will be posted later on this website, in a separate entry, entitled, “Visual Regions in the Brain”.

Images of blood vessels, neurons and and neural processes in the eye.

The human retina contains a very large number of neurons (cells) and a very much lager number of neural of processes providing links between them. It also features a dense network of blood vessels that supply blood to the neural processes. Together these three components make a significant barrier to the passage of any light that strikes the receptors. Until I learnt better, this light-blocking function did not seem to be of much of interest.

What changed my mind was the discovery that the light-sensitive cone and rod receptors that transform light-energy into neural signals, do not face towards the incoming light, but away from it. Consequently, the light coming into the eyes has to penetrate this light-impeding layer of neurons, neural processes and blood vessels, before it reaches the receptors. To add to my surprise, it turned out that the light-receiving end of the receptors is buried in a layer of dark matter. It was some time before I realised how these seemingly bizarre arrangements make possible visual perception as we know it.

The barrier confronting the light that enters the eye

It turns out that the barrier of neurons, neural processes and blood vessels compensates for the fact that the rod receptors are very much more sensitive to light than the cone receptors. The benefit of this state of affairs is that it enables a necessary degree of functional equality between the responses to the incoming light of the two different receptor-types. Needless to say, this equalling up would not take place, if the light striking the less sensitive cone receptors were to be subjected to the same impediments. This explains why the forces of evolution have created a gap in the neuron and blood vessel barrier in front of the region known as the fovea, exactly where the incoming light strikes the cone receptors.

Glare-blindness

If the equalling up process did not take place, the rod receptors would be bleached out whenever the incoming light was strong enough to activate the cone receptors. The result would be a massive degree of glare-blindness in daylight conditions.

Dire consequences

If they were effectively blind, the rod receptors would not be able to participate in daylight visual processing. As a consequence, the neural computations of whole-field relations could take place. One of the many aspects of visual processing that would rendered impossible would be the separation of reflect-light from body-colour. As a result there would be neither colour constancy, nor the use of the information residing in the  reflected-light that has been separated out.

If this were so,  pretty well all that I have written in my book “Painting with Light” would be nonsense.

Burying the receptors in dark matter

The burying of the light-sensitive receptor heads in the dark matter is easier to explain. It prevents the light from scattering from one receptor to the next and, consequently, reduces blurring.

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The eye
Figure 1: Blood vessels blocking light from the ‘rod’  photosensitive  receptors.  The small darker disc is where the light sensitive ‘cone’ receptors are located. Notice that no blood vessels impede the passage of incoming light to these.

 

The eye
Figure 2: This image of a small section of a network of neural processes gives an inkling of an idea of the extent to which these these can block the incoming light.  For reasons explained above, the blockage only applies to ‘rod’  photosensitive receptors. It does not apply to the ‘cone’ photosensitive receptors .

 

The eye
Figure  3: A diagram of cell-types in each of the five layers of the retina. The massive numbers of each of these contribute to the blocking of the light arriving at the ‘rod’  photosensitive receptors.

Some numbers and sizes

One estimate for the number of the light-sensitive receptor cells is in the region of 150 million. Although the precise number of neurons and neural processes in the retina is unknown, it is certainly in the hundreds of millions.  All this packs into an astonishingly thin layer (less than 0.5 mm) whose extent can be compared to that of a 10p piece.

 

A reference

If you want a comprehensive account of the component parts and structure of the retina, you could consult the relevant pages of the website of the The National Library of Medicine.  You will find them dizzyingly more complex than the grossly oversimplified information given either above or in the ‘Glossary‘ extract.

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Shading and surface-form

What colour are shadows and shading?

This POST provides a link to “Shading  and surface form”, Chapter 27 of my book “Painting with Light and Colour”. It may surprise many that it comes in PART 2, which is dedicated to painting with colour. The reason is that the visual systems that are used to create colour consider blacks, whites and greys to be colours and, accordingly, they treat the blackness, greyness and whiteness of shadows, shading and highlights as colour.

Surface-solidity, spatial-separation and ambient-allumination

However, this fact of visual perception does not mean that the reflected-light does not provide information to other visual systems, working in parallel. In particular, the systems that tell us about surface-solidity, spatial-separation and ambient-illumination continue to perform their function. As explained in PART ONE of this volume, although they enable us to sense these properties, they never make them visible in the way body-colour is visible.

The problem of invisibity

The “invisibility” of these properties confronts artists trying to represent them with the seemingly insoluble problem of deceiving the eye/brain into “seeing” something that they cannot see. Luckily due to the research of Seurat, Cézanne, Bonnard, Marian Bohusz-Szyszko and others, a simple and, accordingly, practical resolution of this seeming paradox is available. Moreover, due to research undertaken by myself and colleagues, its efficacy can be explained in scientific terms (see many chapters in Book One of this volume and Chapters 13 and 14 of “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”)

The solution

The practical solution provided to me by Professor Bohusz-Szyszko is to ensure (a) that there should be no repetitions of colour in any part of the surface of paintings and (b) that all the paint that is actually visible to viewers of the painting should be made up of mixtures containing some proportion, however small, of complementary or near-complementary, pigment colours. In this conntext,  it is important to emphasise  that this solution should be kept in mind when painting shadows, shading and highlights.

CHAPTER 27 – SHADING AND SURFACE-FORM

Two images and a question to consider

surfaces
Cowslips and violets

surfaces
Flowers in a vase

Question: Do all the “mistakes” and inconsistencies in the “flowers in vase” painting matter?

Other relevant chapters from Book 2: “Painting with Colour”

Other relevant Posts on colour and light in painting:

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My two part volume on drawing

After posting thirty-seven of the chapters of my four books, I realise that I have missed out the “Introduction” to my two PART volume on drawing. In the edited extract from it below, some general remarks are followed by a brief focus on two issues of fundamental relevance to what follows. Also, as an extra bonus, I have added three images .

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EDITED EXTRACT

 

on drawing
A drawing by Auguste Rodin, one of two artists who set me on the way to scientific research

GENERAL INTRODUCTION.

This volume differs in fundamental respects from earlier books on the same subjects. It offers new and practical guidance on drawing-from-observation. It does so whether the artist is seeking:

  • Greater accuracy.
  • More expressive power.
  • Ways of speeding up without losing control.

Its starting point is an analysis of widely used artistic practices and teaching methods. The next step is to explain not only why these have both proved to be of lasting value but also why, as they are currently taught, they have significant limitations.

A main source of evidence for the proposals elaborated in the following pages is research, done by myself and colleagues at the University of Stirling in Scotland, into how artists use their eyes when drawing or painting. This forced me to a number of conclusions that differ fundamentally from those provided by other authors, including those promoted by Betty Edwards in her extremely popular  book, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”.

A similarity between Betty Edwards and myself is that both of us link our main explanations to contemporary science, with a special focus on neurophysiology. The difference is that the conclusions to which we come are radically different. While she relies heavily on a false theory of brain function, my arguments are are wider ranging, more up to date and demonstrably more relevant to drawing practice. As a result, I am able to offer a great deal of  new and reassuring information on human visual capacities, clarify the nature of the obstacles facing all who engage in drawing from observation and indicate effective ways of circumventing them.

During my 30 years teaching at the Painting School of Montmiral, I have had the opportunity of testing the research-based ideas on hundreds of students of all levels of attainment and a wide variety of aspirations. Although the outcome is clear and encouraging, a word of warning is appropriate. Both experience and theory make it clear that, while early progress will almost always be rapid, both for beginners and experienced artists, there is no escaping the fact that, as with all skills, the highest levels of attainment require a longer term commitment.

Experience and theory also show why early difficulties seem more daunting to some people than for others. Should this turn out to be your case, there is no need to be discouraged. No matter what your starting level, you can have confidence that, if you have the motivation to persevere, the new ways of looking and doing that I advocate will help you to far exceed your expectations.

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THE SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

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on drawing
A drawing by Edgar Degas, the other of the two artist who set me on the way to scientific research.

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My experience as a teacher makes clear that everyone has difficulties with the accurate depiction of the outlines of objects. My research at the University of Stirling helps us understand why. It also sets us on the way to achieving the combination of accuracy, speed and expressive power mentioned above.le of

As the  science upon which much of my teaching depends will be unfamiliar to readers, a few words on two key ideas are appropriate. These centre on the subjects of “the variability of appearances” and “recognition”.

Variability

A useful preparation for understanding the nature of  the problem with which variability confronts us, is the realisation that no two objects or parts of objects ever present the eyes with the same outline, even ones that are classified as the same object-type. Indeed, because appearances are altered by every change in viewing angle and/or viewing distance, even the same object (unless it is a sphere) will never be identical in shape unless viewed from exactly the same position. Each set of relationships, whether between different sections of contour or regions colour will always be unique.

This fundamental truth of visual perception brings us to an extremely important implication of this unvarying rule of variability and the consequent uniqueness of all perceived objects. It is that, since, by definition, recognition depends on seeing something as being the same on different occasions, the precise characteristics of the contours artists seek to represent can only have a supplementary role in the processes that enable it.  Accordingly recognition must regularly involve overlooking the details of shape in favour of more general information. As we shall see in the following pages, the extent of overlooking can be huge.

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on drawing

Figure 1: A diagram of the working principles of the analytic looking cycle
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Recognition

Most people feel that they experience “recognition” as a conscious activity. But they are wrong to do so. As illustrated in Figure 1 (the details of which will be explained in due course), this key process in sensory perception always takes place before conscious awareness is achieved. The reason is that the function of recognition is not to produce an image of an object, but rather to access the knowledge required for activating instructions as to how to react to it.
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As the diagram illustrates, the the knowledge accessed is always in the form of action instructions. These may be concerned with guiding arm, leg or other body movement or they may direct the movements of eye, head or body that enable us to target aspects of appearances that require special attention. It is only at this analytic-looking stage that consciousness has a role in visual perception.
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But how does the eye/brain know where to target attention? It may help when seeking an answer to this question to remember that analytic-looking skills, like all other skills, are developed for specific purposes. Some skills, such as the ones learnt when very young, create platforms for more advanced ones. Anybody who sets themselves to learn a totally new skill has no option but to start with existing skills. All of these will be a compound of basic skills learnt as an infant, such as those required for grasping objects or for guiding the direction of crawling, and more advanced ones that have been developed later, such as those required for washing up, for using a computer or for any kind of sport.
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This being the case, it follows that, if we wish to acquire complex visually mediated skills, we will have to learn the action instructions necessary for guiding appropriate ways of looking. Accordingly, although people learning to draw for the first time might have had experiences relating to other tasks that have allowed them to develop skills that could contribute the acquisition of drawing skills, they will never be enough. No matter how near the fit, they can only be of limited use unless appropriate ways of building upon them are developed.
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If advanced artists assume that all this has no relevance to them, they should think again. The handicap of being saddled with old knowledge when facing new situations does not only apply to learning skills in hitherto untried domains of activity. It also applies to developing any skill at all beyond its present stage, no matter how well honed that may be. When Edgar Degas, one of the most skilled drawers in history, asserted, “I must impress on myself that I know nothing at all, for it is the only way to make progress”, he was making the claim that, no matter what the subject matter, fresh ways of looking will always be required.  In view of the unvarying variability of appearances, there is no alternative but to agree with him.
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A more familiar and general way of expressing the above conclusions is that learning a new visually mediated task requires leaving aside bad, old habits in favour of adopting good, new ones. This book provides comprehensive information concerning how this can be done in the domain of drawing from observation
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on drawing
My son Thomas at a difficult moment in his life, a drawing that owed a great deal to my scientific research.

Below are links to chapters from my volumes on  drawing:

VOLUME ONE : “DRAWING ON BOTH SIDES OF THE BRAIN”

BOOK 1 : “DRAWING WITH FEELING”

The chapters so far loaded:

BOOK 2 : “DRAWING WITH KNOWLEDGE”

The chapters so far loaded:

OTHER POSTS ON DRAWING:

 

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Full contents lists

An artist among scientists

Mutual benefits

During the twelve years I worked among scientists at the University of Stirling in Scotland, a transformation took place in my understanding of just about everything to do with the role of the eye and the brain in the organisation of the  the main perceptual and motor skills used in the making of drawings and paintings. PART 2 of my book “What Scientists can Learn from Artists” tells of experiments done by myself, colleagues and other scientists that made especially significant contributions to this exciting development.

Chapter 7, (accessed by clicking on link below) offers an autobiographical introduction the contents of PART 2 that gives a flavour of what I was up to in those years. A theme that runs through its pages is that the transformative learning was a two way process, offering benefits to all concerned. Time revealed many unexpected advantages in my being a combination of an experienced artist/teacher and a naive beginner in all the scientific disciplines in which I was to participate. My new colleagues found themselves faced with a drip feed of questions coming from unfamiliar perspectives that were to prove their value as catalysts capable of stimulating new ideas for a surprising number of highly expert scientists, working in a variety of disciplines. In return, their often participatory responses enabled me to put together the body of ideas that underpin the originality of my books, my teaching and, to an important extent, my work as an artist.

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CHAPTER 7-AN ARTIST AMONG SCIENTISTS

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artist aong scientists
Two stripy paintings, made while the story above was unfolding.

 

Chapters from “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”

These deal in greater depth with subjects that feature in the other volumes

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More information on my main colleagues

 

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Illusory pictorial space

Illusion in painting

Over the centuries, at least since the Italian Renaissance, artists have sought to represent three dimensional objects and scenes on two dimensional surfaces. By implication, this required them to create an eye-deceiving third dimension (‘trompe-l’œil).

To achieve their objective, they and their successors:  (a) mastered the laws of ‘linear perspective’, (b) delved deeply into the subject of ‘anatomy’, (c) explored the form-making properties of ‘gradation’, (d) recognised the importance of ‘overlap’,  (e) provided explanations for the phenomenon of ‘aerial perspective’, (f) explored whole-field lightness relations (‘chiaroscuro’) and (g) demonstrated the value of existing knowledge of the form of objects and the layout of scenes in influencing how viewers would perceive them (‘cognitive  cues‘).  In other words, over the centuries the artists have pioneered our understanding of just about everything that psychologists of perception needs to know about illusory pictorial space.

However, there was one big absence and it is this that dominates the discussion of illusory pictorial space in two of my books. In “Painting with Light and Colour” the subject is approached from the perspective of artistic practice. In “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”, which contains the chapter that can be obtained by clicking on the link below, its treatment has both scientists and artists in mind.

The chapter also touches briefly on the issue of what they saw as the immorality of deceiving the eye, which was to have both a decisive and long lasting effect on the evolution of painting from the Impressionists until the late 1960s at least. More on this in my other books.

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CHAPTER 6-ILLUSORY PICTORIAL SPACE

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A pictorial history of illusory pictorial space

 

 pictorial depth cues illustrated
Vittore Carpaccio (565-1625) – Lots of depth cues: overlap, shading, linear perspective, etc.

 

 pictorial depth cues illustrated
Claude Loraine (1600-1682) – Using aerial perspective to deceive the eye

 

 pictorial depth cues illustrated
Berth Morisot (1841-1895) – Brush marks made evident to emphasise the picture surface

 

 pictorial depth cues illustrated
Cézanne (1839 – 1906) – Doing his best to hold everything on the picture surface

 

 pictorial depth cues illustrated
Picasso (1882-1973) – Intent on keeping depicted surfaces near the actual picture space

 

 pictorial depth cues illustrated
Peit Mondrian (1872 1944) – Sought to depict a “spiritual space” within the flat picture surface.

 

illusory
Jackson Pollock – The critic Clement Greenberg, described him as creating as “A space within the picture surface”

 

illusory
Ellsworth Kelly (1953-2015) – Failing to eliminate illusory pictorial space

 

illusory
Michael Kidner (1917 – 2009) – Gave priority to keeping colours flat on the picture surface

 

illusory pictorial space illiminated
Ellsworth Kelly (1953-2015): Unambiguous flatness at last. But is it a painting or a sculpture?

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Other Chapters from “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”

These deal in greater depth with subjects that feature in the other volumes

 

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Why read my science book?

A paradigm shift

Back in November 2019 I started posting chapters from “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”, the book which presents the research and the science based ideas that that lie behind much of the contents of my three other books: “Drawing on Both Sides of the Brain”, “Painting with Light and Colour” and ” Fresh Perspectives on Creativity”. I set the ball rolling with with six of the chapters that describe research findings which were in large part responsible for:

  • Overturning almost all the preconceptions I had about the nature of visual perception.
  • Providing the building blocks required for replacing them with the coherent picture presented in these books.

When I first came across the material I have summarised in these chapters, their cumulative effect on me was more than just fascinating. It amounted to a paradigm shift. My hope is that reading them will perform the same service for others, particularly when buttressed by the contents of earlier and later chapters.

Below is an extract from the “Preface” to “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”, which summarises its structure. The chapters so far published in my Posts come from PART 2. In the next weeks I will be posting chapters from PART 1 and in the coming months chapters from PART 3.  I will wait to see the level of interest before I go on to PART 4, which I have reason to believe will be is considerably more demanding on non scientists.

Also below are links to already published Posts.

The structure of the book

Because the context of the knowledge of scientists and artists is so different, it seems prudent to provide a certain amount of background material which, while likely to be familiar to readers from one side of the arts/science divide, may well not be to those from the other. Thus PART 1 contains a number of general ideas both artistic and scientific many of which may well be familiar to one community and not the other, and PART 3 provides a basic introduction for non scientists to the nature of visual perception that emphasises the variety of visual systems involved in different aspects of visual processing. The function of PART 2 is to describe the main experiments used to underpin the theoretical speculations which lead to the general model of perceptual and cognitive processes that provides the subject matter for PART 4. Throughout the attempt has been made to present ideas in such a way that they will be understood by both groups.

Chapters from my book “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”

These deal with subjects that feature in the other volumes in greater depth.

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A reminder

There are still places vacant for the 2020 sessions of the Painting School of Montmiral. Here a three photos to remind you of our idyllic setting and the seriousness of the teaching

book chapters
Castelnau de Montmiral from the South

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book chapters
View from the breakfast balcony

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book chapters
Out on the esplanade

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Me discussing student work

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Constraint in artistic aids and practices

Is constraint necessary for creativity?

The purpose this Post is to provide a link to “Constraint in artistic aids and practices , Chapter 9 in my book “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”. As in several other Posts that publish book chapters, I include a slightly edited reprise of its“introductory”, in the hope it will whet your appetite and encourage you to click on the link below. I am hoping that when you have read all the chapters of all my books, you will realise that the answer to the question posed in the heading to this section is “Yes”. The images below illustrate two methods of constraint favoured by artists in former centuries that foreshadow ones that are widely used today: For example, photographs, slide projections, and computer controlled images. All of these, whether consciously or not, make use of constraints, the possibilities of which have been developed by evolution over the millennia, such as standing still, choosing a viewing distance or closing an eye al of which constrain input to our visual systems and, thereby, enable learning and creativity, its corollary.

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constraint
figure 1 : Illustrates the lengths of which artists were prepared to go to achieve accuracy

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constraint
Figure 2 : Illustrates a “camera obscura”, a simpler solution to the problem of obtaining accuracy than the one illustrated in Figure 1. However, both imply artist’s mistrust of unaided analytic looking

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Introductory

If we want to be creative, we will have to free ourselves from the constraints of old ways of doing things in order to go beyond them into new territory.

In this chapter, we take a step towards the goal of a practical understanding of how this might be done. It starts with my telling how I stumbled on the intuition that constraint may be a necessary condition for exploring the unknown, and provides examples of how the community of artists, whether consciously or not, have made much use of this possibility. Eventually I found myself coming to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that constraint is necessary if we are to achieve either meaningful freedom or creative self expression. I also came to realise that the use of constraint is one of the guiding principles of our evolution as a species.

My approach to going deeper into the creative powers of constraint, starts with account of how I came to realise their central importance. I use the particularities of my own story because of the insights it furnishes relating to the creative process in general: long periods of gathering data, struggles with the confusion that they seem to engender, a sudden intuition that provides a lead on how order might be found and, finally, doing the work necessary to test its validity.

The inspiration for my breakthrough came when reading a book by J.J. Gibson, one of the most controversial yet influential perceptual psychologists of the day.

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CHAPTER 9-CONSTRAINT IN ARTISTIC PRACTICES

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Other chapters from “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”

These deal in greater depth with subjects that feature in the other volumes

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Movement created information

The title of  the chapter to which this Post is linked is,“Information created by movement”. It comes from my book, “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”, which is divided into four Parts.

  • The “First Part”  introduces ideas (a) to artists, who are not familiar with the science, and (b) to scientists, who lack a background in art.
  • The Second Part is called “The Evidence”.  It includes chapters on (a) traditional artistic practices (b) my “drawing experiments“, (c) the importance of “movement” to visual perception (this Post), (d) “colour” related phenomena (all but one already posted) and (e) other aspects of vision with profound consequences (already posted).
  • The “Third Part” presents images of neural processes and lists relating to regions of the brain that participate in visual perception. Even though these are hugely simplified and very far from complete, they suggest that something amazing and seemingly unimaginable must be going on in our eyes and our brains.
  • The “Fourth and final Part” goes deep into theory with a view to gathering the disparate strands presented in the preceding chapters into a coherent whole

As indicated above, the link provided in this Post gives access to a chapter that focuses on the role of  “movement” in visual perception.  As in other Posts, I include below a slightly edited version of the “Introduction”, in the hope that it will encourage you to click on the link situated below it, which gives access to the chapter as a whole.

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movement
Read the chapter to which this Post is linked to find how a few milliseconds of  movement can catapult these points of light into two outlined figures at play.

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Introduction to Chapter 11

The studies of blind-sight and unilateral neglect discussed in the last chapter show that visual perception is not the kind of thing that can be understood by introspection alone. Rather, it is the fruit of a labyrinthine concatenation of neural processes, involving activity in large variety of locations within the brain. The same message can be derived from the diagrams to be shown later (in chapters 14 and 15). These provide glimpses of a massively complex system containing a wide variety of neural structures, hundreds of millions of neurons and untold billions of connections between them. This chapter is grist to the same mill. It concentrates on the work of James Gibson, Nicholas Bernstein and Gunnar Johansson, three scientists who extended our understanding of the experience of seeing.

Although many might suppose that movement-generated perceptual cues could have little or nothing to do with drawing static objects from observation, they would be wrong, as made clear in my book on drawing. However, their usefulness in drawing practice is far from the only reason for devoting a whole chapter to them. Thus: Gibson created a new interest in the power of movement-generated cues, Bernstein used elegant mathematics to demonstrate the interdependence of top-down and bottom up influences in the control of visually guided movement, and Johansson produced a demonstration that blew away a multitude of misconceptions.

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CHAPTER 11- GIBSON-JOHANNSON – INFORMATION CREATED BY MOVEMENT

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Other chapters from “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”

These deal in greater depth with subjects that feature in the other volumes

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Blindsight & the bakery facade

This Post provides a link to Chapter 9 of “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”, the book that presents the science that supports so many of the ideas and proposals found in my other three books. Its full title is “Blindsight, unilateral neglect and the bakery facade illusion”. It recounts what for me was a particularly exciting adventure into the mysteries of eye/brain function. This had its origins in research I was doing at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and reached its conclusion here in Montmiral, as a result of trying to understand why a student, who was good at drawing accurately, persisted in seeing the slope of a wall top differently from three other people sitting close to him. It turned out to be a question of his being taller than them and, as a result, he was relating the wall top to a slightly different background, with fascinating consequences: Ones which were to provide the substance not only of the chapter to which this Post is linked, but also of a closely related chapter in my book on drawing.*

Blindsight
Piazza del Duomo, Milan, which plays an important role in a fascinating, game changing story told in this chapter.

Two paradoxes

The bringing together information about “blindsight”, “unilateral neglect” and “The bakery facade illusion” provides yet another approach to making  clear that the process of “seeing” is complex. It also presents evidence that lead to two paradoxes, namely that:

  • we can all “see” what we cannot see
  • we can all “imagine” what we cannot imagine”.

Luckily knowledge of eye/brain systems can make sense of these seemingly senseless propositions. Also, it can alert artists to some deep seated problems they cannot avoid facing when drawing or painting from observation.

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As I usually do when presenting book chapters, I am providing below an edited version of the “Introductory” to the chapter in question in the hope that it will whet your appetite for reading the chapter itself.

Introductory

This chapter delves a little deeper into the subject of visual mechanisms and systems. It is one of the most important in the book because it provides information concerning the central problem as to how preconscious, bottom-up processes enable top-down control of the skilled use of eye/hand coordination. The first part takes the form of a detective story. The key to unlocking the mystery lies hidden in two experiments, relating to two visual impairment syndromes, each resulting from damage to a different part of the brain. Though other syndromes can be legitimately given the same names, they will be referred to as “blindsight” and “unilateral-neglect”. The second part of the chapter describes a powerful visual illusion, first noticed in relation to the facade of a building in Castelnau de Montmiral, S.W. France. This is shown to have general implications both for artists trying to depict scenes containing rectangular surfaces and for psychologists of perception, trying to understand the mechanisms underlying analytic-looking.

 

WHAT SCIENTISTS CAN LEARN FROM ARTISTS” CHAPTER 10 – “Blindsight, unilateral neglect and the bakery facade illusion”

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*  “Axes of symmetry, recession and the constancies”: A chapter from my book on drawing that shows some of the ways the theory in this more scientific chapter can be related to practice.

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Other chapters from “What Scientists can Learn from Artists”

Like the chapter to which this Post is linked, the links below can be used to access chapters from the middle section of my  book that elaborates on the science behind subjects that feature in the other volumes:

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