Art & Perception

I first came upon Dorman’s work in a show at New York’s CUE Foundation and was thrilled. More work and information here.

drawing by Françesca at age 3

I wanted to do a post about the drawings that my children made. I have an incredible amount of them (drawings, that is, plus five kids). The first thing was to choose and scan and crop and choose and scan and crop. more… »

Here are the drawings I have been working on in the new year.

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Earlier we came to an informal consensus that children’s art is not real “art.” I don’t see that as a problem, but it makes me curious: what are children doing when they draw? To try to get some insight, I’ve been drawing together with Nino and Fran. more… »

I decided to start drawing again on a serious basis and I today I wanted to try to capture the texture of these pears. I wanted to see if I could make come out in the drawing the complicated texture these pears have. I think got some of the feeling of these slightly shrunken and beaten up pears. The challenge is to capture that without paint. I wanted to see if something that I could paint I could also do it in pencil.

Is children’s art “art”? Steve said that age does not matter; Derek, June, Bob and Arthur were ambivalent. I thought I should ask a Françesca (four and a half years old) for her opinion about what she makes, and also about work by “grownups.”

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Hanneke can’t post today and she asked me to fill in for her. I wanted to remark on an interesting trend in some of the comments about her work. For example, looking at an image of Old grapes, new painting, Colin Jago wrote “I seem to be looking down on the grapes and up at the glass.”

For Colorful Underpainting, Steve wrote “my first impression was that the cloth was somehow mounted on a wall. The bunch of grapes and the way they rest on it make this interpretation virtually impossible, of course, but I still don’t feel the correct perspective as strongly as I would like to.”

Hanneke paints her still life paintings “from life” and she tries to paint what she sees. Is she trying to show multiple viewpoints, or to produce distortion in perspective? Not intentionally, she has said. But is she doing so unintentionally?

Let’s take a look at Hanneke’s imaginary still life drawing and see if can find out more about the viewpoint issue.

In this imaginary still-life, the vessel is seen directly from the side, but the table top and fruit are seen from a different perspective, from above. We seem to look down on the table top while looking at the vessel from the side. This merging of different perspective points lends an interesting quality to the imaginary drawings. More examples of her “multiple viewpoint” imaginary drawings are here, here and here.

Let’s compare this to a drawing made directly from a real still life the same week when she made the imaginary drawings:

Do you see the difference? In this drawing from a real still-life, multiple viewpoints are not manifest. The fruit and the vessel are both seen from the same viewpoint.

I think that Colin and Steve are on to something with their comments about Hanneke’s painted still life work. In the “from life” still life paintings, the perspective may be technically correct, but she sometimes manages to produce a feeling of different viewpoints nonetheless. Would it be interesting if she tried to bring this difference in viewpoints more explicitly into her “from life” still life paintings? Or, should she work to correct the apparent flaw when it occurs?