Studio Update With Pretty Pictures

Errol Fielder (Study) #1, 2010.  4cm x 5cm

Errol Fielder sat for a portrait a couple of weeks ago while I drew his likeness in acrylic paint onto some canvas.  I used that drawing process to study Errol's face along with the finished drawing to help me capture Errol's likeness in a portrait miniature made of four layered pieces of acetate.  This is one of nine and currently the best one.  I am still working on the others to see if I can get a better one than this, and there are a few coming close.  The process involves thinking of the figures head structure differently to how you would draw them.  Instead the form isn't shown from tonal qualities but by empty space between the slides.  These portrait miniatures are idea for my white-cube portraiture research.

In addition to the miniatures I've been working on more anamorphic drawings of Arthur's bust from more extreme angles using longer canvases.  These works are to have the portrait literally follow the audience around the room.  The anamorphic image will work only for the people who look at it.  This means that the image won't exist other than when it is looked at, and for anyone else in the room who is not in the privileged location to see the anamorph that's showing will just see the distortion.  The angles of the anamorph also converge on the correct point of view to look at it.  As you can see if you follow the grid lines in the above image you can image that where the bottom and top line converge is the ideal place to view the undistorted image.

Two Portraits of Marilyn Thompson

Marilyn Thompson #1, 2011

Marilyn Thompson #2, 2011

Marilyn Thompson is a dearly loved Wagga Wagga artist who I discovered accidentally had been greatly influenced by Arthur under his tutelage at Charles Sturt Uni back in the day.  Apparently Arthur's printmaking processes profoundly shaped Marilyn's artmaking process subsequently, so I asked if she would sit for me to do a painting of her before she heads off (she's moving away from Wagga Wagga to live with her family). 

Although she believes Arthur might not recognise her if they passed on the street, I couldn't help but think that Marilyn reflected a side of Arthur that probably wouldn't have been represented without her in the exhibit.  I did these two portraits in the hour sitting (painted in the order shown above).  

As will happen with the rest of the portrait miniatures for the project they will be rescaled and made into portrait miniatures 5x4cm.  Currently Marilyn and Errol are the only two portrait miniatures I've begun.  I have one more person scheduled and several more to locate.

Here is some of the process work of Errol's portrait turning into a miniature on layered acetate.  You can see a number of ghoulish figures and these are all Errol.  Each part of the face is layered on one of four pieces of acetate which divides the three-dimensional information of his head in an attempt to create a likeness with what is actually very basic shapes.  In this way each layer looks kind of creepy in a similar way as if you looked at the different layers of a person's face in real life, only in this case no blood and brains.  I'm making ten because I'm expecting most of them to look nothing like Errol.  I'll pick the best one for showing.  I'm doing the same with Marilyn too.

Portrait Sitting

Arthur sat for me today in his studio. I set up easel and drew him while he digitized some of his super 8 video works.

This is Arthur in his studio office.

This is my favourite. I used my last canvas and thought I'd just throw together some last minute gestures to use as a reference for the finished portrait. The short time I spent on this helped me to get to some of the most important characteristics of Arthur's face.

Another anamorph.

Anamorphosis: The second

I'm working on getting some anamorphic drawings of the bust Arthur gave me. I initially drew a few of different angles of the bust but decided I needed anamorphic drawings of the view of the head facing the observer.

The biggest difficulty in this kind of drawing is seeing into the picture independently from normal depth perception. It's easier to see what's going on in the picture if you take a photo of it or cover one eye.

This is the view from the canvas at an angle of about 45 degrees from the picture. Pete held up another image of the same thing at 90 degrees so we could get the sizing right and see how the anamorphic drawing compared.

The canvas seen from 90 degrees looks weird and lopsided. You can see the distortion from the angle of which it was drawn. It slopes to the right and down in response to the fact that I was observing it being drawn from above and right.

Starting another one. You can already see here the tendency to fall back into weird perceptual habits of treating the surface of the picture as the plane on which the picture goes, however it's the depth and recession of the canvas into which the picture exists, in the space of the canvas but not on the flat canvas.

Bri held up the second picture for me.

I'm making these anamorphic drawings to be the antithesis of Everything. Everything is a mapping of the figure where the user can manoeuvre around the figure interrogating it. These anamorphoses will do the opposite, they will be projected, while people move around the image. The work will following the viewer, obscuring it's body from the viewer and meeting the gaze of the observer.

Errol Fielder

Errol Fielder is a Wagga Wagga artist and the first of my portraits of the Arthur Wicks associates.  Throughout the process of investigating Arthur for his portrait, I'm finding people who know him (better than I know him) so that I can find little bits of Arthur in the people who have had some kind of place in his life.  Errol has been an associate of Arthur's professionally and socially.

These two portraits of Errol were painted in about an hour (not including coffee break), and will be used as the basis for a portrait miniature.  I'm still looking for people who know Arthur well, so if that's you and you'd like to get involved in the work, I'd love to hear from you.

I had the pleasure of being invited to Errol's place after the portrait's were finished and got to see a whole lot of his paintings he'd been working on over the years.  Stunning landscapes with a surrealist influence - deeply personal.

Another Interactive Portrait: of Myself

So I made this under the influence of some fad back in '07ish and just last week I was listening to a podcast on Radio Lab about machines and humans, which reminded me of two things:  Everything, and my cybertwin that I made ages ago.

So they interview the cybertwin guy and a few people who have had some interesting interactions with robots and chatbots, and I couldn't resist the temptation to see what my cybertwin could come up with.  It has a very sassy and sometimes sarcastic tone about it (which I'm trying to train it out of), and the way it speaks reflects alot about myself in 2007, but I've started giving it a bit of an overhaul and teaching it about my practice, (incase anyone asks about it).  A few people have tried talking to it and have found it difficult.  Part of that might be because they want to confuse it because it's a robot and the experience is weird, and partly because the robot can get confusing over the conversation and seems to forget things that have occurred in the conversation so far.

Some pro-tips for those who want to engage my cybertwin are don't say one word things because although trying to confuse can be fun and a bit of a power trip, after you do it twice it becomes super boring.  But the good news is it doesn't hold a grudge and will jump on the next idea you throw at it.

If you say anything to it it's helpful to me because (and this is a disclaimer) I read the transcript of the conversations people have with it to work about better responses it could have to things and teach it more about manners etc.

Studio Update: Portraiture

I've been buying timber to make frames to strech canvas over for my project.  It took me about two full days to saw, screw, nail and stretch the canvas last week and only half a day to go through half of them today.  The drawings aren't complete but it their getting like how I want them.  I'm going to put them up on Everything.


These portraits are workings from the bust Arthur Wicks gave me.

Featured Artist on ERAP Homepage

There are little moments of joy that come when, as a newcomer, I get my flag on different aspects of the art community.  Makes me feel like less of a new comer too.  Eastern Riverina Arts Program featured me as their artist of this month.

Woodworking for Canvases

Ready to paint!

Arthur Wicks' Head, Everything and DIY Stretcher Bars

I looked into the price of stretcher bars and realised that my budget for the project couldn't fund the amount of stretcher bars I would need plus the canvas and paint for the project.  To cut costs I decided I'd make my own from 42mm x 19mm dressed pine.  Above is a picture with three stretched canvases from my DIY activities.  

I have begun working with intensive studies of the bust Arthur gave me, for Everything.  My supervisor for this project informed me that I have to fill out a risk assessment type of form for portraying people as part university of the University's policy.  When I told him that so far I hadn't been drawing anyone from life and that I'm drawing the bust Arthur gave me he said that I don't need to get consent from an "inanimate object".  This particularly interested me because of the recent Archibald Prize winner Ben Quilty whose Portrait of Margaret Olley was painted from a photograph.  A photograph is a flat print of a rendering of light usually resulting in a picture.  I wondered if I was painting a photograph of Arthur would I still be required to get the consent?  I probably would, but not if it's a cast bust from Arthur's face, which is still a depiction of Arthur.  Ben Quilty didn't depicted his portrait of Olley as a painting of a portrait photograph.  There was no mention of the surface and texture of the photographic print, or the thickness or weight of the paper, or the pixels as viewed from a computer screen, or any clues about the fact that he had worked from a photograph, other than that he said that he had.

I'm doing something a bit different in my use of the bust.  In my work, Wicks' bust isn't a technology for me to reference the face of my subject, it represents the negotiation between myself and Arthur around the limits of Arthur to be involved in the work.  When I met Arthur I asked if I could meet up with him once a week and draw, and I drew a parallel to the therapist patient relationship in psychoanalysis.  Arthur didn't want that level of commitment in my work for whatever reason, he might not have wanted to spend so long with a stranger or maybe just doesn't like to plan his life that far in advance - whatever the reason, the result was that he loaned me this bust which I accepted.  This bust is an artifact of the story between the artist and the subject, an event that occurred from the meeting.

Portraiture made up entirely of objects isn't a radical notion.  Michael Zavros' painting Ars longa, vita brevis was a finalist in the 2009 Archibald Prize and features cosmetic items with no depiction of the facial likeness of the subject.  The subject is portrayed through the items selected and painted by the artist  and arranged to appear like a skull.

In the previous blog post I mentioned the portraiture practice of Riceke Dijkstra, whose portraits outline the awkwardness of certain subjects revealing their individuality through their deiberate attempts of concealment and blending in to avoid the dangers of intimacy, the result is that we get clues about them, about how they attempt to do so which can reveal defenses, prejudices or expectations about them which we can make inferences from about their character and personality.  The same types of inferences can be made when the subject offers a bust instead of commiting to a regular session meetings.  Maybe it tells us that Arthur has better ways to spend his time?

THE BODY AND/OR MIND

According to the aforementioned definition of portraiture provided by Shearer West,  a portrait depicts a particular person with particular attention to the face and body.  Seeing as the face is a part of the body I decided to explore the body to begin with.

Sally O'Reilly's book, The Body in Contemporary Art, self consciously takes the stance against mind/body dualism that the self is "perceived as a synthesis of mind and body rather than one being a container for the other" (p8).

"The body has become inseparable from the social and psychological processes that perpetualy influence it" - p46

O'Reilly offers Roland Fischer's Chinese Pool Portraits, 2007; Bettina von Zwehl and the portraiture of Riceke Dijkstra as contributions to this idea of the body and mind as intertwined.  Portrait subjects tend to have an individuality about how they present their body or how they believe bodies are conventionally presented for portraiture (p32).  Awkwardness in the subjects' bodies betray aspects of their individuality by revealing certain vulnerabilities (p33).

Roland Fischer

Chinese Pool Portrait (4088, Zhu Zhu), 2007

Type C Print. 22.8 x 26.8 in (58 x 68 cm), edition of 10

55.5 x 63.8 in (141 x 162 cm), edition of 5

Von Lintel Gallery

Roland Fischer's Chinese Pool Portrait, 2007 (above) stages the figures in such a way that their identities are concealed from the viewer.  Each subject is placed in the same way with a relaxed facial pose revealing little about who they are.  The reason I decided to include this in this post is because the body that's shown is similar to the bust which Arthur Wicks loaned me for my portrait of him.  These vaccuous present the opposite of an embodied self and show an un-psychological form of the face and body like a tabula rasa person emerging from a primordial goo as the self is disembodied.  The reason this is successful is because musch of the body is excluded resulting in less opportunity to view vulnerabilities or imperfections.

I consulted an exhibition catalogue for the upcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery titled Inner Worlds:  Psychology and Portraiture, which I thought would be right up my alley for understanding the body/mind component of the portrait but to my surprise the exhibition seems to be a look into psychiatry and the minds of traumatised soldiers such as Albert Tucker, who painted 'psycho-portraits' (Harding, p139).  The shock of the war on the soldiers in WWII shattered their nervous systems which inhibited both their physical and psychological functioning requiring medication to comatose them on occasion (p142).   

The Inner Worlds catalogue doesn't include much information about the role of psychology in portrait painting and its usefulness in my portrait work for this year is limited, though a closer reading might reveal some interesting clues about where a critique of the psychological element of portraiture can be found.   Mike Parr's practice is briefly explored.  Parr's work keeps popping up as I explore the influences of both body and mind in portraiture with his endurance self-portraits and performance work.  

The Inner Worlds catalogue explores the psychopathology within artists rather than psychological aspects of portrait subjects.  Nevertheless it's a published catalogue of psychology and portraiture which shows the extreme end of the spectrum and a period in Australia which experienced a saturation of psychological discourse. 

Harding, Lesley.  'Albert Tucker and the Faces of War' in Inner Worlds:  Portraits and Psychology.  Edited by Christopher Chapman, 139-169.  Canberra, Australia:  National Portrait Gallery, 2011

O'Reilly, Sally.  The Body in Contemporary Art.  London, UK:  Thames and Hudson, 2009

LIKENESS explored

To understand the concept of mimesis further I thought I ought to look into likeness as it is a property of portraiture as determined by Shearer West.

Likeness between a picture and the object depicted is made by the relationships between the parts (Gombrich, p34), which the audience begins to notice after a period of adjustment (p47). The degrees of adjustment that the audience has to make will determine how much likeness there is (p49).

The relationships are assessed within the paintings and also between the paintings, in the gallery and upon successive viewing over time (p51). Advances in illusionary techniques lose their power over time and become integrated into the audiences expectations (p54). Therefore achievements in visual technique become expected over time.

In terms of portraiture, this is a liberation. The idea of mimesis and likeness is flexible and will depend on the expecations of the audience for the style in which the artist has depicted the subject. Gombrich states that the limits of likeness are the "medium" and the "schema" (visual conventions which have conditioned the audience).

"Style" is a term which derives from the Roman writing instrument "stilus" (p8)

"There is no neutral naturalism. The artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a 'copy' of reality". - p75

"What looks like progress from the point of view of the mastery of a medium can also be viewed as decline into empty virtuousity" - p8

Gombrich argues that a picture cannot be true or false or correct or incorrect because art is conceptual (p77). Therefore he argues that in portraiture there can be no objective likeness netween the work and the subject and that art causes and is caused by "habits and expectations" (p77).

Gobmrich, Ernst. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Phaidon Press Limited: Oxford, 1959 (3rd Impression)

MIMESIS: A Definition

Mimesis is an ancient term refering to a work of art's "accuracy or the versimilitude of its presentation of an external reality." - (Adams, p1)

The concept of mimesis has been a problem for portraiture from the onset of modernization, as artists moved away from strictly represenational styles of art to more universal and abstract production (West, p157). The portraitist's production of likeness or visual imitation of the sitter made public opinions view them to be like a technician and devoid of creativity (p191). One way the modernist portraitists overcame this was to have use their painting style to reflect the character of the subject (p200)

Shearer West uses the term mimesis without giving a definition but uses it interchangably with likeness, representation, versimilitude, description (p195-6). Mimesis, however, is not meant to refer to symbols, which visually look different to how the thing they represent looks.

Mimesis featured a return in post-modern art as a parodic way to explore issues of identity (p205).

Throughout my research into portraiture, the term mimesis keeps popping up. In the sense of visual art, it refers to visual descriptiveness. There are strong parallels between mimesis and what West refers to as likeness as shown in the previously blogged definition of portraiture. There are perceptual questions which arise about mimesis, such as a curiousity around visual perception and mimesis and what makes one image a more accurate mimesis than another, bringing us back to perception, cognition, and isomorphism.

Adams, Hazard, ed. Critical Theory since Plato (Revised Edition). Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992

West, Shaearer. Portraiture. From the Oxford History of Art series of Books by Oxford University Press, UK. 2004

This Little Teapot Exhibition: Pic's and Video

This Little Teapot was exhibited at Paper Plane Gallery in Rozelle and opened on April 13.

Above is an installation shot of the exhibition of one part of the show which features my work Impression, 2011 appearing on the right side of the photo.  The work is made from tea on canvas.

Impression, 2011.  Loose-leaf black tea on unprimed canvas.

By Tony Curran

Reading tea leaves has been a source for uncovering untold fortunes of the future.  Whether it's reading tea leaves, coffee, star constellations, knowledge and inspiration have been developed from uncertain accidental or coincidental appearances.  This is why Da Vinci encouraged young artists to find inspiration in bits of dirt on a wall or patches of damp.  The process of finding an image in something vague like a cloud can be considered divine intervention, an omen or a message from the heavens.  Or they could just be psychological constructions which we project onto the form to make it meaningful.

Impression is a self portrait of a teapot in loose leaf tea painted by the teapot, assisted by the artist.  It's a visually vague tea painting, left open to interpretation much like how we see the world, art and ourselves, how we tell stories about phenomena, and how difficult it can be to say anything meaningful about our own selves.  Its visual vagueries are a result of a lack of ability on behalf of the teapot to perform an action it was not designed to do - depict itself, nevertheless once the teapot is seen, it cannot be hidden.

What is the difference between what we see depicted in nature and what we see depicted in art?  In this work the artist's has worked with the the object of the drawing while using it as the drawing tool to intentionally depict a teapot.  Attempting to articulate the form of the teapot the cumbersome nature of the teapot was an obstacle for rendering a descriptive picture of the teapot.  As a result the picture is a stain which slightly resembles teapotness.  The sepia colour makes this impression aged, like an old photographic print.  It visually reminds one of a relic such as Shroud of Turin which is itself a vague impression and its vagueness makes it more authentic as a sacred artifact.  The face of Christ in toast or on a public wall seems to pop up every now and again sometimes making front page news.

Intentionality sets it apart from accidental phenomena, fluke or mistake.  Intentionality alone makes the work a representation of the teapot whether or not it looks like one.  The context of the exhibition further helps the viewer to see the teapot in the image, and it is through these associations and the intentionality of the artist (teapot) that an engagement with the work is possible.  

You might be looking at it upside down.

this little teapot @ paper plane gallery from qwux on Vimeo.

Anamorphosis

Anamorph from Tony Curran on Vimeo.

I'm experimenting with using anamorphic strategies for drawing portraits in the white cube.  The anamorphic techniques have been used since the Enlightenment but it's still a strange experience.  It's a technique that confuses perception researchers because the image doesn't exist on one surface and thus raises difficult questions about realism and distortion (Hyman, 2000. p27).  I've been looking for a way to develop a sense of perspectival dependency in the work at the end of the show that doesn't depend on technology which could break down, or cost more than I have for budget.  By perspectival depenency I'm refering to accounting for what the viewer sees in their particular space.  In doing so I'm looking into the pre-electronic modes of interactivity.  Currently Everything is completely electronic, but to extend the work beyond the internet and into a physical space in the white cube I'll need to rig up monitors, projectors and maybe sensors to detect where the viewer is and project what they are suposed to see.  Once I start thinking about monitors and cables my head starts to cramp up because of how unelegant artworks like that are, unless it visually consolidates some themes in the work.  If I can pull something DIY off and have it looking neat then that'll be much more enjoyable to look at.  There' pressure from arts institutions like Ozco to get good with electronics, and I'm always trying to fight that.

Some other strategies I've looked into are lenticular printing which would eat up my budget and give me enough space for a fraction of what my ambition is.  By experimenting with anamorphs I'm hoping I can direct viewers to see hidden surprises in the portrait.  Also the anamorph works for inconvenient surfaces to produce a flat image - which portraiture conventionally is.

Anamorph (study), 2011.  Charcoal on paper.

This is not a picture of anyone in particular, just a sketch of some head proportions so that I can make some decisions about how to proceed with this line of enquiry.  Mike Parr's early self portraiture is interesting for anamorphic stuff because he used to do endurance work locked to one area making self portraits.  Because he was fixed to a certain point his portraits were often distorted like this , because the drawing was consistent with his oblique perspective.  Others of his were mediated by flexible mirrors which he would use to deliberately distort.
 

Hyman, John. Pictorial Art and Visual Experience in British Journal of Aesthetics 40, no. 1 (2000): p27.

Defining Isomorphism

Laurent Mottron uses isomorphic as a synonym to "Phenomenal resemblance" (p1386).  "The structured material composing human codes can be described as embedded organisations of isomorphism.  Each class of isomorphism defining a particular level (eg. phonological, lexical)."

Mottron goes on to describe isomorphisms as accessible as detecting recurrent structures within an array of units.  Because isomorphism's are a about similar structures, many can occur at once if someone is speaking, while using intonation as well as doing anything else visual or auditory which would create isorphisms in the observer. (p 1389).

Steven French Discusses isomorphisms as partial structures of an object which give clues about partial structures of another (1482).  Because everything has bits, some bits are common, and the isomorphism picks compelling similarities out of a pattern.  This concept can be quite abstract and pertain to the scopic view of the observer and the kind of details that they are attending to.

Mottron, Leaurent.  Dawson, Michelle. & Soulieres, Isabelle.  Enhanced perception in savant syndrome:  patterns, structure and creativity in Philosophical Transcripts of the Royal Society. Vol. 364, (2009) 1385–1391


French, Steven.  A Model-Theoretic Account of Representation (Or, I Don’t Know Much about Art . . . but I Know It Involves Isomorphism) in Philosophy of Science.  (2003) p1472-1483

A Definition of Perception

Arnheim mentions the task of visual perception as "collecting the raw materials for cognition"(p. xix). as a result a good understanding of perception will be insufficient without s good definition of cognition. In qualifying some other characteristics about perception which can be added to learn the nuance of the topic Arnheim offers the following.

"All perception is the perceiving of qualities, and since all qualities are generic, perception always refers to generic properties" (p. xxiii) and "all perception involves aspects of thought" (p. xxiv)

the relationship between thought and perception is what is in discussion here, and can be rephrased as the relationship between perception and cognition. Arnheim says that Perception involves thought and in the preceeding phrases of the same sentence mentions that thought involves perception. This is an outline of a transactional system between the two.

Cognition has been defined in Shettleworth's book Cognition, Evolution and Behaviour as "the mechanisms by which animals aquire, process, store, and act on information from the environment. These include perception, learning memory and decision making." (p5). Shettleworth explains "For many Psychologists, mental representations of the world are the essense of cognition" (p6) and mentions functioning isomorphisms which are believed to be the bridge between brain processes and events in the world according to Gallistel.

In a lecture Dr Neil Overton mentioned an idea which has one word in common, and it was Isomorphic Correspondence which is the process of recalling a past experience which forms meaning around a visual stimulus, the example he gave is when looking at a crucifixion we remember a time when we were hurt, maybe with a nail, or by something on our hands etc.

A comprehensive definition of Isomorphic Correspondence and fuctioning isomorphisms will advance further understandings about the relationship between perception and cognition, giving a greater understanding to perception which my research topic.



Arnheim, Rudolf. Visual Thinking in Overview, Foreword in Perception and Pictorial Representation. Nodine, Calvin F & Fisher, Dennis F. (Ed.) Paeger Publishers, NY 1979 p xix-xxix

Overton, Neil. Visual Coherence Class lecture, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW, March 4, 2011.

Shettleworth, Sara J. Cognition, Evolution and Behaviour. Oxford University Press, NY 1998 p5-6

A Definition of Portraiture

When doing research into something it's often a good idea to get a proper definition of the topic.  I found a good one which has some decent flexibility within it and it came from Portraiture by Shearer West.  I'm not reading the whole book, but the first chapter (p21-41) gives a good indication about what you can expect to be judged on when making a portrait.  According to Shearer West a portrait depicting a particular person with particular attention to their face and body.  Their likeness is a requisite as well as an indication of the type of person that they are (eg. their social role).  Next on the list is a distinction of the Body and Soul or subjectivity of a person which is something that depends on cultural beliefs at the time about what forms identity, psychology and character.  These are combined with an engagement in the process of the sitting, to convey a relationship between the artist and the sitter at the time of the sitting.  These are dimensional, that is, West's definition provides some flexibility allowing for cultural beliefs and fashions.

In Chapter 2 (p43-69) she discusses the role of portraiture as a work of art, as a biography, as a document, proxy (staying connected to the subject) or gift, commemoration and memorial, and as the portrait as a political tool.

West, Shaearer.  Portraiture.  From the Oxford History of Art series of Books by Oxford University Press, UK.  2004

Preparing for This Little Teapot Exhibition at Paper Planes

What's Inside, 2011 from Tony Curran on Vimeo.

Head to Paper Planes Gallery in Rozelle from 6-8pm for the opening of This Little Teapot, curated by Rebecca Murphy.  

Visual Perception

From what I've read so far, the debate around visual perception centres around some specific concepts to do with photorealism, illusionism, opticality, ambiguity, meaning, nature-nurture, context and depiction.  Writers have serious disagreement about perception which is made clear by their different approaches to studying the field.

Nature-Nurture
One of the strongest debates through the literature I have read so far are to do with the nature-nurture debate around extracting meaning from images, some researchers such as Ramaschandran, Hyman, Goodman and Arnheim argue that perception can be looked at as a systematic set of rules for critiquing the success of the composition of a work where as the other side is Gombrich, Gibson and who have have written in support for the cultural side discussing visual literacy as similar to learning a language.  In this discussion a lot of linguistics comes to the fore as evidence in support of art as a learned language such as in some of the works by Munro Beardsley.  Linguistics can offer a useful perspective sometimes when it's used to deconstruct arguments already put forth, but the analogies of linguistics and logical algebraic forms are sometimes used to assert that because grammar is rational and structured then so too must pictorial design be.

Opticality vs Impressionality
Descartes looked at Optics, The impressionists looked at optics also.  The perceptual theories of Goodman look at the correspondence of optical information onto the retina from the artwork to the optical information on the retina of the depicted object.  This has strong parallels with photorealism and don't take into acount the stylistic and impressionistic nature of the art.  Arguments around the priveledge of perspective are crucial to this argument, however the development of cartesian perspective has been demonstrated to be a matter of style by Hagen, by demonstrating the role of assumptions in "incorrect" perspective drawing such as naive art and Egyptian art.

Illusionism
This is the cooky side of the debate where researchers give illustrations of visual phenomena which confuse or mislead the audience.  A few examples of these are MC Escher's entire body of work, Op Art, Salvador Dali's use of double images etc.  A lot of these images are plays of perspective and formal elements and used to demonstrate a perceptul interruption.


Ambiguity and Imcompleteness
I've stored these in the same category although sometimes they are treated distinctly.  For example Neil Overton's CSU lecture on illusionism in 2011 for VIS101 mentioned Ambiguity as something with double meanings, which is something that I've listed in illusionism.  Overton mentions that ambiguity and incompleteness are form of illusion which I believe is an extraction from Gombrich's Art and Illusion.  Ambiguity, however might be better understood as being an image which can depict multiple meanings which is why I have placed it here next to incompleteness because it involves a constructivist approach similar to Gestalt Psychology, where the audience completes the image by using a range of clues provided in the work and a range of clues provided from their own visual experience.


Meaning and Depiction
Again this falls under the nature-nurture debate as well but John M. Kennedy wrote an interesting article which mentioned blind people being able to feel lines of a representational image and apprehending it as a represtentational composition.  Kennedy's article in John Fisher's Perceiving Artworks is a guide as to what he sees as the representational system for conveying meaning and depiction which includes simplicity, distortion, Gestaltism, context and codification. These issues make up the content of the debates around representation, meaning and depiction.  There are parallels between the meaning of an incomplete work wuch as a tea stain or some other pattern which can be seen as resembling something.  Kennedy discusses the artificiality of an object as a function of depiction which is similar to Wolsterstorff's notion of seeing representationally.  Some of the really dry and only vaguely relevant theories are preoccupied with linguistic notions of meaning and depiction which reduce the discussion down to component parts and discuss them with parallels to writtern language that they continue to be asserted as analagous to verbal or written language.  


Alot of these discussions are highly abstract and split the hairs on matters which boil down to disagreements about a definition a word or a methodological research preference or ideology.  In the literature that I've read so far no artists have themselves been included in the process so I'm going to see what kind of info I can find from this other persepctive, and I'm going to spend some more time looking at the role of constructivism and psychological projection in an image and how artists have used these methods of constructing images.

I am going to look at Rorshach inkblots and op artists as well as other art practices who utilize percetion as a way of contributing to the knowledge of perceptual theory.  Hagen mentioned while discussing Gibson that it's necessary to look at what artists do but not what they say.  In her article she barely mentions any artists let alone a discussion of any one particular artistic practice.  This is a common trend among the perceptual literature where researchers discuss particular images which are typical of whatever visual phenomena they are discussing.

Some relevant names in the study of visual perception which would be useful for discussion here are Virginia Ross who I found in Jaqueline Millner's Conceptual Beatury, then there's Olafur Eliasson, James Turrell and Bridget Reilly as well as the rest of the op-art movement.  These artists have had some relationship to the study of perception in art whether they be exploring it, referencing it or talking about it.

Hagen's assertion that we shouldn't listen to what artists say about perception beyond their art practice is unfounded because their ability to talk about what they do is going to be informed by the studio practice.  As the artist is not an absent maker of things, he or she actively involves their own professional and personal experiences in their work there is no reason for anyone to assume that the words they use would be unsuitable for the discussion.

Subject Confirmed: Arthur Wicks

After some serious umming and ahhh-ing I've decided on a subject for my portraiture project Everything.    Which means I can make some actual meaningful decisions about what I produce.  The length of the process of finding a subject was probably due to being in a new community and trying to find someone who is someone that people would want to look at and have the patience to participate in the project.  I needed someone who wasn't expecting a traditional portrait at the end of it.

The traditional portrait is a depiction of someone important like a royal or aristocrat, but these portraits seem to serve a kind of publicity for the person it portrays.  There are exceptions to the rule such as the work of Marlene Dumas, late paintings by Elizabeth Peyton and documentary portraiture.  This idea of publicity seemed to me to be the antithesis of a project about producing a work which would create an intimacy between the audience and the subject.  PR portraiture controls the engagement of the audience so that they can have only a one dimensional relationship with the subject - relationship often heavily controlled by the portrait subject due to the "customer's always right" mantra.  Though I don't have a patron, I want my work to reflect portraiture in general because it's a research project about portraiture.  It's been so difficult to decide on a portraiture subject, I was even considering making one up in the superfiction tradition of Peter Hill.  Even submitting it to the Archibald Prize next year which fraudulent qualifications of the make believe subject.  It would have at least made for a good scandal.

I kept hearing about an artist in Wagga Wagga.  The first I heard of him was at Richard Goodwin's most recent exhibition at Australian Galleries.  When I told Richard I was moving to Wagga Wagga he informed me that Arthur Wicks was the man that I needed to meet.  Once I moved to Wagga Wagga, most conversations I was having with people in the arts sector would mention his name in conversation.  Who is this Arthur Wicks?

Arthur's an artist who has worked across photomedia, animatronic sculpture and is still working today.  I went to his house yesterday to meet and greet and tell him about my portraiture project.  I had hoped to meet hi once a week for an hour at a time to do drawing studies from different angles in a kind of participant observation voyeuristic style of working which would mirror the kind of contact a psychotherapist has with their patients - a model which is based on intamcy, empathy and understanding of the psychology of the subject.

This psychological aspect appealed to me also because psychologists keep records of their interactions with patients as a confidential psychological profile which contains all the nitty gritty pathological suspicions of the subject.  This profile or dossier nicely mirrors the portrait, though it is a portrait in a language owned by a different profession and discipline.

I noticed a bit of hesitation on the behalf of my subject for such regular and intense contact with me, however, I've been given access to his studio to come and go, to find bits and pieces that help me in constructing his character and understanding him as a subject.  What he sent me home with was something way more interesting and valuable to the project.

In the 80s Wicks made this bust of his own head, from which probably all of his figures are cast.  Not only is this a bust of Wicks' head thirty years ago it's also a key ingredient to his practice as an artist.  I've been using this as a reference to depict Arthur.  I'm at a cross roads about whether I should be depicting the bust or depicting Arthur.  If I depict the bust I'm depicting Arthur associatively, but the bust has its own history and story which despite it's facial likeness to Arthur is a product of its own life experience.  Also if I paint the bust am I painting a portrait or a still life?

Studio Update

I began the laborious task of collating all the images that I've produced for Everything.  It took a lot longer than it looks but I'm using this image to show me how detailed my work is at present.  I've moved in to a new studio area which is double the size of the space I was in but the wall area isn't as nice for pinning.  This gives me a virtual studio wall where I can see which areas need attention the most.   I want to get a lot more information than this image depicts, and to start including the torso.

The design for the installation has begun.  Today I made my white cube which I will use to start experimenting with the space.  It's at the scale of 1:200 of the size of the room it will be exhibited in before the end of the year.

I made contact with the subject of the work.  I'm not sure I want to reveal his name yet, or ever for that matter, but I'll be meeting up at his studio next week to discuss my project, hopefully to begin his involvement.

Keeping a Track of Important Ideas

Evertything, (detail)

I’m working a piece of research for an Honours year at Charles Sturt University in Fine Art which you may have already ascertained from previous pics at my studio there. I’ve come to a point in the research where I can’t avoid to journal it to trace the impact of the ideas I’m consuming are having on my projects.

I’m going to update this on my blog because that’s where the general progress in my practice is tracked and if I’m going to be exploring these issues why not share them with whoever wants to read them.

What you can expect to hear information on is about Art and Visual Perception, Portraiture, and the idea of the White Cube Gallery.

There are a number of parallels between these three ideas and they are mostly about the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. So to bring you up to speed on the progress thus far, I’ve been working on a project called Everything, which I’ve been blogging previously. At the moment the work is a piece of internet art which animates as you move the mouse. This project is informed by a written dissertation about Art and Visual Perception as well as being informed by practices in contemporary portraiture.

Inside the White Cube by Brian Doherty has influenced this project profoundly by exploring the role of the exhibition context as an integral part of the work’s substance. In addition to this book I recently read Internet Art: The Clash of Culture and Commerce by Julian Stallabrass which outlined the history and use of internet in an art context. It outlined the internet as something other than a medium, but as a space for all media to be reproduced. I thought this was interesting because I was inspired to begin this work as an internet project where the html was as much medium as the drawings and paintings which constituted it. Having read Stallabrass and O’Doherty, I’ve really started scrutinizing the display of my work which I hadn’t really considered as being integral to the project.

Hence I have decided that the direction Everything will go in from now will be a work exploring Portraiture Since the White Cube. The white cube is a useful context for an inquiry into portraiture because it means that I won’t get bogged down in investigations of old portrait masterpieces that while beautiful don’t pertain to my broad interest of contemporary practices of depicting people, which can be informed by contemporary insights from science and philosophy about identity, subjectivity and peoples’ relationship to physical reality. To inform this project I’m looking at artists who produce art specifically in this contemporary context and focusing on these artists who make portraits in this context. Prominent players of both these criteria are Tracey Emin, Marlene Dumas, Elizabeth Peyton, Bill Viola, as well as some Australian artists including Del Kathryn Barton, Shaun Gladwell, and Ben Quilty (sometimes). Some other artists I’ll be looking at in regards to their use of the white cube are Olafur Eliasson, James Turrel, Marcel Duchamp, Ella Barclay, This is not an exhaustive list of artists whose work will be feature in the research but a good place to start.

Because I’ve made the choice of the white cube as a context or at least some kind of gallery type design inspired by research on the white cube I’ve been thinking about a Salon style of hanging which preceded the White Cube. The Salon style hang is the style of the old galleries where they hung paintings on every inch of the wall. I think it’d be interesting to do a portrait which has this style of hanging with hundreds of portraits of the same person by the same artist so it’s kind of like a salon but completely constructed or simulated from the white cube. I could involve a more nuanced installation among the work. This idea is very interesting to me at the moment.

With the research in visual perception, the key works I’ve been reading to kick start the project have been articles written by John Hyman as well as talks I found on iTunesU (a fantastic resource for passive learning) from MOMA, TATE, and hundreds of great art institutions around the world. The debate currently is very varied and nuanced around specific schools of visual perception theorists.

In order to get a good grip on the nitty gritty within the quarrels I went back in time and found a really obscure book from 1980, so obscure Amazon doesn’t have a picture of the cover AND they got the first name of the author wrong. The book is called Perceiving Artworks and is a collection of essays from epistemologists, psychologists, art historians, and philosophers who have something to say on the debates around visual perception. It had an essay by one of my favuorite perception psychologists so far, Rudolf Arnheim. I decided to give the other authors a try too.

I won’t evaluate the climate of perception theory up until 1980 but I will mention that none of the researchers explore studio practice or the practices of any contemporary artists in their exploration about perception. Perception has definitely been explored extensively if not invented by visual artists well before anyone else and this struck me as a little strange that they weren’t included among the experts.

Many of the authors dissected the notion of perception with visual examples from either historical art masterpieces or curious psychological illusions like the Muller-Lyer Illusion, they were talking about seeing as well as talking about talking about seeing. I know it was a book and a book is made of words but it’s odd that the weight of the book was devoted to the thoughts of people who make a living out of reading and writing as opposed to seeing and drawing, Ie where are the visual experts? It was sad to see there were more linguistic philosophers, like Wittgenstein or Chomsky, cited than philosophers of vision or optical scientists.

Visual experts are artists, designers, and architects and probably more. These professionals make a living out of training their visual skills to produce the most compelling visual experiences. Examples of these professionals who explore visual perception as a major part of their conceptual practice are: Olafur Eliasson, James Turrel, Bill Viola, Leonardo Da Vinci and a whole slab of Op Artists such as Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely, Vigrinia Ross (a contemporary Australian Artist I came across in Jacqueline Miller’s Conceptual Beauty). The next steps in this exploration into visual perception are to explore the practices of these artists and find out who their conceptual influences are. I will also be looking specifically at the writings of Rudolf Arnheim and Ernst Gombrich (the godfathers of the art and perception query).

I’ll be posting more about all of this research under the Tag “Honours 2011”, so the reader will be able to target this research down the track. I wanted to keep it on the same blog because in 2009 I went on a blog binge and started more than were good for me, and it’s better to keep it all in one place. I’d also encourage anyone who would like me to elaborate on certain things I’ve discussed here I’m happy to answer any questions about this research as it’s an opportunity to concretize and rationalize bits of information that I come across, so feel free. So feel free to comment.