Shigeru Watanabe has shown that pigeons can be taught not only to tell Monet from Picasso (PDF), but also to make seemingly more elusive distinctions, such as “good” art from “bad”. As reported in Science Daily:

In the first series of experiments, four pigeons were trained to recognize ‘good’ paintings by being rewarded with food if they pecked at the ‘good’ pictures. Pecking at ‘bad’ pictures was not rewarded. They were then presented with a mixture of new and old ‘good’ and ‘bad’ paintings and the researchers noted which paintings they pecked at. Pigeons consistently pecked at the ‘good’ paintings more often than at the ‘bad’ paintings. …presented with grayscale paintings, they were no longer able to distinguish between the paintings, indicating that they use color cues for discrimination. When the paintings were processed into mosaics, the pigeons also found it difficult to distinguish between the paintings, showing that they also use pattern cues to make their beauty judgments.

Morgan Meis, tongue in cheek, suggests this may be the end for the few art critics left. The one consolation is that the birds seem to take no particular joy in their ability, quite contrary to the human’s tendency toward inflated pride in their refined judgment.

Of course, the pigeons are “merely” learning what they are taught. The quotes are to indicate that this learning involves a rather high degree of abstraction from the training stimuli. One can’t help wondering whether they have any innate personal (?) preferences. On the other hand, are humans any more sophisticated in coming to their concept of beauty, the good? And besides, how much did your art education cost? More than a few weeks’ worth of birdseed, I suspect.

The show is composed of interleaved groups of my photographs and Kerry’s prints. My contributions came from the Sourdough Trail project, the Cottonwoods series, and the Meeting Sky series, together with a newer set, unimaginatively called Windy Day. The latter consisted of the image above in a constellation with the following six, which are actually details of the same scene photographed at different moments.

These were strung out in a wavy line against the color-contrasting, warm brick. The large picture is 22″×13″, while the smaller ones are 9″×9″.

Windy Day set

Some of Kerry’s prints are quite large, and certainly dominate my photographs in terms of size. However, I don’t think the viewer’s experience is quite so lop-sided. What’s your impression?

Windy Day next to Anam Cara and Wilderness

Along Sourdough Trail (3 of 5) next to Tilt series

One of Kerry’s sets consisted of three grids of 9″×12″ prints sandwiched between layers of plexiglas, each depicting the same tree in front of a friend’s house, but (loosely) in morning, midday and evening light.

Composite prints by Kerry Corcoran

For this show I experimented with papers. My Windy Day and Meeting Sky sets were printed on tones (”white” and “cream”, the latter actually closer to pale peach) of a watercolor/printing paper (Stonehenge). This took some experimentation with inking profiles, and yielded less sharpness and contrast than normal photo printing paper, but that seemed appropriate. I also chose not to use glass in the rather minimalist frames, and even exposed the rough edges of the paper on two sides.

Framing with exposed deckle edge

The absence of glass not only made the paper more present, but avoided reflections, which I always find quite annoying. Hopefully the paper will stand up well, without warping significantly. It’s not so much of a risk with photographs—I can print a new one if need be.

Reflections on glass, not on paper

As I’m writing this, Birgit has posted a comment on our earlier discussions of dissolving boundaries in Giorgio Morandi’s paintings. Though not quite explicit, that idea was certainly in my head with the later work in this show. The complexity of the tree/sky boundary in Meeting Sky, with the densely ramified twigs, and the softness of it in Windy Day, with the motion blur, are two ways this idea can be approached in photography.

I occasionally worry that my tendency to analyze—some might call that an understatement—could be a negative influence on my work, causing me to lose spontaneity or fall into one rut or another. But I’ve now proven to my satisfaction that any effect is both unconscious and ineffective. Here’s how it happened.

Last early Sunday morning I went wandering about the northern Gallatin Valley, which is to me what Hockney’s East Yorkshire is to him, namely the local cultivated landscape. I was well past halfway through when the idea come to me that I had been photographing with an eye to flat patterns of tone, broad swaths of dark and light, with accents here and there. Gone was the three-dimensional landscape, extending into deep space. I was succeeding in the effort commented on last week: I was thinking about the two-dimensional picture, and without even remembering to try.

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That’s the thought I still had with me two days later as I sat down to process images at the computer. But as I worked, the realization slowly grew that I had not only not abolished projective space, I had even enhanced it beyond the usual. The bright, hazy air between the foreground and the Bridger mountains, lit from behind, produced a tremendous aerial perspective, which seemed to be strengthened further by the relative unformity of the recession in bands moving up the picture.

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I found this light-space effect particularly interesting because it seemed to be the opposite of what I had thought of as convention that light could highlight an important foreground element, which then stands clearly forward of a darker background. Looking into that a bit, it appears that landscape masters such as Poussin and Claude Lorrain were actually more subtle, typically using light more surgically to create a receding succession of brighter areas.

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Notice that in these photographs, the mountains are not so far away as they were for June in the desert, and I had no missing middle distance problems, although there were some hidden stretches in the first three images. Rather, it is the mountains that almost disappear, remaining just faintly there like a Cheshire grin. You don’t so much see the mountains as the air before them. (Hockney, by the way, seems to eschew aerial perspective altogether, along with other familiar methods.)

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So much for knowing what I was doing. But that begs the question of whether my current understanding is any more accurate. Do these photographs in fact give you a sense of depth as strongly as they do me? And do you sometimes change your mind completely about how you think your artwork works?

Even if you don’t care greatly about Picasso, I recommend the Charlie Rose interview with Françoise Gilot, who lived ten years with the man. A talented artist herself, and very independent-minded, Gilot frequently discussed art with Picasso. Much of what he said about how he worked has come to us through her. For example, regarding the rather complex, high cubist paintings, he said than in the “early stages” there were almost no “references to natural forms…I painted them in afterwards.” Braque had a similar working procedure. Rather than abstract from an initial representation of a scene, these cubists–at least for a time as their approach evolved–roughly laid out their abstract, faceted spaces and forms, then filled in enough clues to suggest the subject. Those clues could appear in rather disconnected spots. I believe it was the dealer Kahnweiler who said they had developed a way to free objects, showing that they existed without showing where they were located.

Picasso was first introduced to Gilot in 1943, when he begged an introduction from an actor friend, who was sitting nearby at a restaurant with Gilot and another painter. I’ve seen it told several places that Picasso approached their table carrying a bowl of cherries, but Gilot mentions that he also left with them! After they began living together in 1946, Picasso painted a series of portraits of Gilot entitled Femme-fleur (loosely, Flower woman), shown here in order. With their hair transformed into a leaf canopy, they have an intriguing relationship to a well-known 1948 Robert Capa photo of the two at the beach.

Elsewhere on the Picasso front, I’ve started listening to TJ Clark’s Mellon Lectures as podcast from the National Gallery of Art (thanks to Namaste Nancy for the reminder). He’s a wonderful and detailed reader of paintings. But in an odd moment near the beginning, he appeared needlessly and overly scornful of those interested in the artist’s biography. No doubt, in the case of Picasso, there’s much third-hand gossip, and I suspect a good deal of what’s been written about his life would be worth reading. Nevertheless, he’s a fascinating and powerful character, fun to learn about even if I didn’t feel I was gaining some insight into his art.

I see the importance of being able to deal with an artwork in its own terms. But it seems not only limiting, but self-deceptive to claim that external knowledge is irrelevant. (I hasten to say that Clark himself does not make such an extreme claim, though he appears to have some distaste for personal history, despite frequently citing Gilot as a source.) Could we learn from art anything about ourselves, others, and the world, if those things were not involved in the work?

Do you have an interest in the personal histories of artists you care about? Or do you prefer to experience the art from a more “purist” perspective?

Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

It struck me this might be relevant to speculations about the narrative tendencies of a panoramic format, where the question arose of whether one reads left-to-right or vice-versa, which would affect the direction of any implicit narrative. The answer seems to depend on the way you read a book in your language. But I hadn’t thought it would depend on which wall of a gallery the picture was hung, as it would for the Kuuk Thaayorre.

That led me to search for eye-tracking studies of picture viewing. I didn’t get too far, but I did come across an article on the difference between artists and non-artists. Which yellow tracks below represents the path of an artist’s gaze? [Warning: answer in the next paragraph]

I think most artists will guess it’s not the one on the left. It seems reasonable to me that the artist is interested in detail and technique everywhere, and in the relations of all parts to whole. The explanation in the article is roughly the same thing said inversely: non-artists are more focused on salient features like people and faces. But the more interesting ideas are in the comments, such as

This seems similar to studies of eye-movement in the sightreading of music. Those who are particularly good at sightreading are constantly looking over the entire page, whereas novices look mostly at the exact spot they are playing.

and

By the looks of it the non-artist is seeing the scene as if it was real, sizing up the doorway and figure on the first, checking the distance from the horizon on the second.

Whereas the artist appears to be looking at the flat image only as a two dimensional space.

Aside: while deep into the results of a Google search on eye-tracking, I encountered a story not of viewing, but of creating a picture using that technology. The Hawaiian artist Peggy Chun, progressively incapacitated by ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), used various methods to continue painting, eventually making use of eye-tracking and finally of a direct brain interface to make pictures.

So I’ve learned just a little about how we look at pictures. But as to how that affects our experience of them, I’m not much the wiser. I can imagine that one’s sensitivity to narrative elements might depend on whether one’s default ordering matched the composition of the picture. Perhaps viewers from different cultures might extract differing stories from the same work for this reason.

Jerry Rankin is a Montana artist who seems able to come up with completely new ideas in every project he undertakes. Only a few of these from his career are available on his web site. Recently he created two sculptures, variants of a theme, that have no precedent in anything he’s done before. Of thin, flat, black steel, they are very simple in design, being straight-edged boomerang-like shapes with one or two slots, respectively, cut into them. Yet they are intriguingly rich in perceptual surprises. I had the opportunity to borrow the cardboard maquettes, thinking I might try to illustrate these effects. Instead, I discovered an unforeseen aspect of how these objects relate to their surroundings.

I mounted one of the maquettes in my study, and took down the pictures from the wall behind to remove distractions. I set about trying to capture what happens when you look edge-on at the piece, seeing both sides at once, one with each eye (and only with that eye). Each side is a horizontally flipped version of the other, so the brain can’t fuse the two images into a consistent representation.

I never succeeded in that effort, but I soon became aware of the captivating shadows cast on the wall. The window opposite was actually a rather complex light source, due to the distribution of bright and dark areas outside. I also had a tungsten lamp in the room which cast a warmer light on the sculpture and on the warm-colored walls. The result was a shadow with multiple overlapping penumbras whose darkness and color depended on the various angles and the distance of the maquette from the wall. Fascinated, I played with a number of arrangements, as you can see below. Note that in these images I have exaggerated the color variation, though it was already quite distinct to the eye. I should add that my impression of the colors seen on two different computers varies significantly, so I’m not sure how it will appear to you. Ideally, the warm color is more that of a lemon than a peach.

As you can guess from the title page in the set above, I went so far as to mock up a bi-fold card, which has the two triptychs printed back-to-back. If you have strong powers of spatial imagination, perhaps you can visualize that after opening the front title page, you see (on the left) the left image of the upper panel facing (on the right) the left image of the bottom panel. Other images appear as the second fold is opened.

A great strength of these sculptures seems to be in their stark, hard-edged minimalism, so I felt a bit odd with my softening, complicating, and adding color. But I really enjoyed the lively interaction of sculpture and shadow, which brings out some of their quirkiness. Though in several ways similar to a more monumental, severe, elegant, and conceptual Ellsworth Kelly I saw a few weeks ago in Minneapolis, they possess a friendlier personality, and, perhaps, a more engaging depth. I’d definitely choose the Rankin over the Kelly for my garden, if both were to be had at appropriate size.

Ellsworth Kelly: Double Curve, 1988

My questions are about the status of the photographs in relation to the sculpture itself. Whether or not of interest in its own right, is such a study useful in appreciating the sculpture? Are the photographs distracting from the subject? As audience, would you rather experience the sculpture directly before viewing any such photographic interpretations? As the sculptor, would you prefer, for publicity purposes, a simpler, more direct image?

My day in Yellowstone last month was a long and varied one (see previous posts one, two, three). As I was leaving the park along the Madison river (almost the longest in the U.S.), I stopped occasionally to photograph the line of mountains on the opposite side of the valley.

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As I was doing this, I had in mind the images from the month before of the landscape by Tepee Creek (post here). I was hoping to catch some of the rhythm, perhaps even musicality, that I found in both places. I’ve nurtured such a poetic and mostly unrealized hope since I read about photographer Michael Smith’s epiphany with sonograms, like the one below of a hermit thrush. Smith was inspired by the beauty of such sonograms in creating some of his wide landscapes. (Though it’s worth pointing out that Smith’s wife, Paula Chamlee, in her own way, succeeded as well or better.)

That wide panoramic format is not only reminiscent of a musical score or narrative progression, but also fit well with the actual manner in which the line of mountains scrolled past me as I travelled. So I tried cropping a few of my images to half their original height, which makes them three times wider than they are tall. It was fun trying to decide what slice to take; sometimes more than one seemed to work.

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For comparison, below are the non-panoramic versions. I’m not sure I like these less, but there is a different feeling with them. The viewer wanders around more in the landscape, rather than taking a journey along a designated path.

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The same approach seems to work as well for a vertical orientation.

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As usual, I like to see how other artists have dealt with similar issues or used similar approaches. Lately, l’ve been looking at Bruce Marsh’s landscape paintings, which are frequently in a panoramic format. Here are just a few from his Recent and Utah galleries (click to see larger versions):

Calf Creek II

Waterpocket Fold I

Mira Bay Hill

The experience of viewing a panoramic depends on size and viewing distance. If it’s large enough that you need to physically walk along it, that tends to enforce a linear trajectory, like reading a Chinese scroll. On the other hand, at that size there is also plenty to see via local roving about of the eye. Wandering with a drift.

One thing I noticed is that my panoramics here seem to be more about repeated patterns and major division lines, like the skyline. Especially images 2-4. Bruce’s paintings have more of a shape, a development or story to them, which I find very satisfying. Waterpocket Fold I and Mira Bay Hill even have evident chapters. My vertical does have more of a storyline, though I can’t decide whether it runs up or down.

Which direction seems more natural to you? In the case of the horizontal panoramics, do you read left-to-right, right-to-left, or start at some eye-catching point in the middle and work both ways? How about the vertical?