Dynamics in the Paralytic Child

In his chapter on Dynamics, Arnheim mentions the Muybridge photographs of the galloping horse, noting that none of the photographer’s stills captures the full intensity of the horse’s speed and exertion as the impossible image of a horse fully spreading his forehand and backhand. One of my favorite and heartbreaking Francis Bacon paintings is a interpretation of another series of Muybridge stills, images of a paralytic child in motion. As Arnheim would anticipate, almost none of Muybridge’s stills adequately capture the distorting that the child’s body must undergo in order to move forward within itself. It is no surprise, then, that Bacon chooses to paint the final image in the series (bottom right still): it is the image in which the body is the most fully distorted, the rear highest in the air, torso most compressed, front right shoulder dropping to accommodate the tilted head and neck. The final Muybridge still not only captures the extent of the child’s contorting, but it also is the most balanced: the bend of the right knee and the resultant weight paced on the left leg is compensated by the weight which the child shifts onto the right arm as he tilts his head towards the camera. Because of the balance within this still, it is the image which most adequately captures a dynamic sense of “movement:” as Arnheim might also have predicted, this image is perhaps the one in which the child looks the least uncomfortably static and frozen. In his adaptation of this final image, Bacon emphasizes this sense of balance with the addition of a door frame which is balanced in a manner similar to the child (with the weight of the foreground, or the closer arm, placed visually on the right-hand side and the weight of the background, or the far leg, resting on the left), with its weight resting in the foreground in the righthand side of the painting and presumably meeting the wall in the background slightly to the left. In his image, Bacon captures the movement and dynamism of this child in a way that the Muybridge stills can only reproduce when shown as a continuous film (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80gjYWEbZlA). 

It is also worth noting that while each of the Muybridge stills contains at lease the horizontal line separating the floor if not horizontal and vertical lines within the body of the boy, only oblique lines (including the one separating floor from wall) comprise Bacon’s image, a device which adds to the dynamic effect of the painting. The Muybridge stills look rather like Hans Thoma’s illustration mentioned in Arnheim, for the child looks stiff because the abnormal curves and oblique angles of his body do not conform to the total, quite grid-like schema of the whole image. Perhaps it is for this reason that the Muybridge photographs look quite scientific and less like “art” than the Bacon painting which situates its dynamic boy within a setting composed of complex and irregular angles. Bacon’s child can stand on his own and no further images are needed to lend the work a dynamic quality, but much of the dynamism within the Muybridge comes from the grouping of the various photographs: the slight changes in the child’s position from one image to the next lends the work the movement Bacon accomplishes in one image. For a painter who so often relies on the theme of being “trapped” or “confined,” it makes sense that Bacon relies so fully on abnormal distortions that convey such dynamism to prevent his images from seeming frozen or lifeless.

The Fake Horse: Handicapped in Time or Space?

I have been thinking over the past few days, for my conference work, about the stark opposition between space and time in a painting, in an artistic image. It has seemed that space is the painter’s mode, her material, the clay of which she has an infinite abundance, and that the limits of her spatial creation only exist in her limits of a human being. She does not, of course, have a paint color of every wavelength, and perhaps her fingers do not have the precision to create a perfect circle. But if she had every material and the power to master it all, she would be unlimited in her three-dimensional spatial creation—as of now, she is unlimited spatially, within the realm of her ability.

Time, however, I have come to see as not the mode, but rather the constraint upon visual imagery. Each frame is limited temporally, to one moment, by necessity of the oneness of the painting. We have there only one viewpoint, which is not progressed or affected by time (except of course by erosion or vandalism, features “outside the art”), and the frozenness prevents the existence of two moments, and at least two moments are necessary for the progression of time. Even a film can only convey one set of visual features in each momentary frame. The challenge of art, then, would be to explode and dazzle infinitely within the boundaries of a single moment in time.

But Arnheim’s Dynamics chapter is shifting my view. He says on 424, “[T]he immobile image is not momentary, but outside the dimension of time,” and that to succeed at conveying a sense of movement, one must convey not one moment of a “temporal sequence,” but must wrap up the entire sequence into one “timeless pose.” Thus an image has actually complete control over time, in that it can distort to its liking the linearity of actual time; it can sculpt the laws of time so that many moments are present in the image’s one moment, or perhaps, “non-moment.” Time is what the image is not constrained by—it can do anything, at any time. There is no time, as it applies to the real world, at all. It can alter “real-time,” or perhaps disregard it completely, by conveying movement by the horses’ limbs in a complete leap, fusing multiple frames of real-life movement into one image. When looking onto a scene, only the center of our stare has that  particularly vivid acuity, and the surrounding and peripheral fall out of focus gradually. Many hyper-realist disrupt the reality of real-time seeing by giving the entire painting a stunning acuity. It merges several moments of real perception into the image’s one container of time. Contrastingly, some paintings (see Flowers in a Pitcher, by Matisse) intentionally mimic the eyes’ temporal restriction (they cannot function the same way in two moments) by giving thick, crisp globs of brushstroke to the important areas, and painting the unimportant, the intentionally peripheral, with less detail and exertion. Perhaps it is not true that the immobile image is “outside the dimension of time” as Arnheim says, but rather, free to alter the rules of time as we know it in reality. A painting has its own dimension of time.

This, of course, does not mean that each work of art by necessity manipulates time successfully—though the image might be intended to convey motion, as Arnheim explains, a snapshot of a football player may have “the human figure awkwardly arrested in mid-air as though struck by sudden paralysis,” (414). It means only that time is the malleable material, available to be manipulated to convey whatever certain visual expression, whatever facet desired in the painting world, unattainable in the real world. Perhaps “successful” manipulation is irrelevant, because it refers to the artist’s intention; the image on the canvas inherently either obeys temporal reality or doesn’t, has tension or has none. Arnheim mentions “Muybridge’s serial photographs…[in which] the full impact of the blow appears only in those pictures in which the hammer is lifted high. In-between phases are not seen as transitional stages of the smashing blow, but as a more or less quiet lifting of the hammer,” (424). If an artist intended the immense weight of inertia that charges the high-hammer images, but produced a work more resembling of the in-between, we wouldn’t necessarily see the image as unsuccessful in its mastery of time, but rather simply a resemblance of the in-between stage of real life’s swinging.

It is interesting that to convey one realistic dynamic, one of the mobile, four-dimensional, non-painting world, we have to destroy another. Indeed, it seems Arnheim, in his approval of the non-realistic outstretching of galloping horses, which forgoes realistic position for realistic speed, holds one kind of dynamic above another; expression is more important than content. What must be conveyed is the sense of tension, weight, movement; it matters not whether these artistic legs are truthful to the limbs on real horses. A step further, it does not even matter what the shapes of the legs are on the painting, but how we perceive them, what they strike the viewer with. We see not the ontogram, as Arnheim says, but the phenogram. It is a function of gestalt psychology, that no beautiful part gives us a stable and complete sense of beauty. It is taking a cue from the subjective principle of perception, that the value of the image of shapes and interplay are not in their truthful being, the noumenon world, but how we see them. Their value relates to us selfishly. It’s not just that the successful horse’s limbs aren’t realistic—it’s that their success relies not on inherent qualities in the painting, but on us as perceptive visual creatures,. There is no visual gestalt without us. The images without us are not images, worlds of their own, separate from and perhaps representative of the real world. They are just objects—when I try to describe what a painting is without humans, I’m at a loss for words that don’t contain a principle of human organization or perception (shape, color, material, piece, instance). I’m reminded of the principle of currency; what we are holding is strips of green paper, and if the human race perished then there would be no monetary property in the bills, no value, nothing except the paper itself.

In fact, it is space that is the painting’s handicap—not in size, for enormous canvases exist, but in that no space can by occupied by two things at once. A square centimeter that is occupied by red, and cannot, also be occupied by blue. It is the law of substance, of matter, that confines our real world as well. If the vase is completely full of flowers, it isn’t full of water. An image can contain many temporal phases in one horse, but it cannot contain two horses in one horse. In photograph overlays, perhaps, a fusion of two spaces into one is obtained, but what results is more accurately its own space, and each image is unseeable in its original form, bound to the other. It is perceived as two spaces, physically containing a determined array of pixels, but understood and impossible to understand any other way than occurring within one space. Rubin’s vase, or duo of profiles, contains two organizational patterns in one image—but as far as which space is occupied by black and which by white, the makeup of the image, the ontogram, the image is limited to being one image. It is photographic overlays and optical illusions that challenge the spatial handicap of painting, and succeeding throughout the course of one viewing—but no viewer, at one moment, can perceive two images, can “see both.”

Children and Art

“Tell me about your picture.” This is the way the teachers at the Early Childhood Center and (progressive) teachers of young children express interest in and appreciation of a child’s artistic composition and the effort they have put into creating it. To ask for a description of the picture includes an implicit appreciation of the complex labor the child undertook to create this picture. More importantly, it respects the child’s developmental stage by letting their picture be what it is to them and thus refusing to impose the confining and potentially destructive limits of adult expectation or “realistic representation.” In short, it honors the ongoing developmental processes Arnheim describes in his chapter on “Growth” and thus falls directly in line with the educational pedagogy he describes as well.

            This is a wonderful outlook because it respects experience. Arnheim’s assertion that an artist has the ability to articulate experience as opposed to the limited ability to express only “himself” “rang true” to me. In the realm of art, this is felt in how off-putting and limited patently self-indulgent artistic expression feels. In the realm of childhood, this serves as the best possible explanation for both the compelling quality of children’s “primitive” art and their own, often very clear satisfaction with their work. The notion of children’s art as being “incomplete” or “incorrect” falls apart in the face of their apparent satisfaction or seeming disregard for the lack of realistic accuracy in their work. Of course they may grow frustrated but this can be explained by their progressing development and thus their growing sense of differentiation—not merely the inherently “low quality” of their work. Children love to pant and draw. The undertake such work with focus and purpose and more often then not are pleased with the results. Think of how often they decide to present their work as a wonderful gift to a beloved family member or friend. Such work is an “impressive achievement,” the result of “laborious experimentation” to meet what their developmental level of perception allows them to see (Arnheim 168).

            Arnheim alludes to linguistic development in this chapter to emphasize how a sense of general structure enables the child finds his or her way to the specificity of differentiation. The similarities between visual/perceptual development and linguistic development are striking. Children learn and grow through experience; they first perceive the “effect” or general structure of experience and then strive to find the particularities and complexities of structural elements. While I believe this course of development is accurate, useful, and observable, I’m impressed by the fact that it’s not necessarily intuitive. To “see” in this way requires rigorous study and reflection. I’m left wondering is this is the dark side of human’s psychological tendency to seek the simplest form. It’s much simpler to think of children’s artwork as incomplete or incorrect. It’s simpler to think of primitive work as primitive. But neither view is accurate or productive when confronted with the lived, sensory experience of perception and creation.   

Sacks & Sue

Reading Sacks’ article, I became acutely aware of my own eyes and the distance between them. An artist is taught that they should leave one eyes-length between the two. While I have long been privy to the notion that the eyes of prey are typically set farther apart than predators, It never occurred to me that this would effect their 3D perception. After regaining stereoscopic vision, Sue became more aggressive (predatory?) on the road—should we then equate the monoscopy caused by strabismus with defensiveness? I am curious, now, about vision in arachnids and other insects with more than two eyes. The media tends to portray an insect’s visual field as a blurry honeycomb of tiny images. It strikes me that there is more than likely a significant overlap in what each oculus sees. Would we humans be filled with the same wonder that Sue experienced were we to suddenly sprout extra eyes?

We are conditioned to assume that eyes are automatically situated on the horizontal plane. That a small difference in the vertical alignment of Sue’s eyes prevented her from experiencing the world as I do completely blew my mind. Under other circumstances I might go off on society’s “normalization” of stereoscopic vision—who’s to say that our way is the right way?— but the fact that alternatives become physically and mentally taxing over time proves my zeal misplaced.

Sacks’ childhood experiments with hyperstereoscopes and pseudoscopes prompted a frantic web search for examples of their effects and an irrepressible urge to build my own from paper towel rolls. It seems that hyper-stereo 3D, where the two perspectives (or eyes) converge at a sizable angle, has become a go-to format for video game designers looking to push boundaries. I’m less likely to emulate his other experience with stereoscopic deprivation, but the fact that one’s entire perceptual framework can shift based on the size of a room confirms that the brain is more responsible for our visual experience than our eyes.

Even after hearing Sue’s account I have a hard time grasping how one could function only using one eye at a time, especially with nearby objects. When I hold my phone right in front of my face I get completely different images from my right and left eyes. The effect of opening one after the other is almost jarring. Would Sue subconsciously favor one eye over the other in all close-up situations to avoid this effect? What if, in a deliberate attempt to trip up her visual stimuli, Sue rapidly alternated the eye she was using to focus? Like most of Sacks’ work, this story leaves me wishing I was able to meet and interact directly with his subject.

Side Note: I know that I, and many of my friends have a hard time working through “Magic Eye” illusions. I was surprised that such a frustrating game is used as proof of stereoscopic sight. Perhaps I’m just jealous.

Sue and Virgil integrating new sight

While reading the Sacks' piece, I became aware of the contrast between Sue's feelings about gaining stereoscopic vision and Virgil's experience with regaining sight.  Sacks addressed this difference in a general way towards the end of the "Stereo Sue" piece,  when he said: "While I liked the poetry of Sue's analogy, I disagreed with the thought, for I suspect that someone who has grown up in a completely colorless world would find it confusing, or even impossible, to integrate a new "sense" such as color with an already complete visual world."

I was also curious about Sue's nearly seamless integration of stereoscopy into her other visual percepts, and agreed with Sack's (especially after reading about Virgil) that while this shift may have been easy for Sue, it is not an experience that can be mapped on to the vision changes of others.  I wonder if it is possible that Sue had an easier experience because she simply had to fuse two separate visual fields in order to correct her vision, while sight for Virgil was an entirely unknown experience.  I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that Virgil had to learn object delineation, while Sue already had the ability to see object boundaries, even if it was on a primarily two-dimensional scale.  It was necessary for Virgil to acquire skills in object recognition if he wanted to be able to correctly interpret visual stimuli, whereas Sue had perfect recognition capacities before the experience of stereopsis.  To reiterate Sacks: Sue had a precursor; Virgil did not, and this precursor, it seems, made all the difference.

Beyond this, I also wondered whether other facets of Sue and Virgil's personalities affected the ease of their visual integration.  Sacks describes Virgil as developing a kind of "psychic blindness" (as well as visual blindness) in reaction to his surgery.  Sacks describes this psychic blindness as a bad side effect of a  surgery gone wrong, but I wonder how intentional this psychic blindness might have been, to what extent it could have been Virgil's attempt to return to the former mental state that accompanied his former visual one.  Sue, in contrast, seemed extremely adaptable to her pre- and post-stereoscopic visual states.  She was not especially bothered by her lack of normal vision (as Sacks describes it), and was not even entirely aware of what was missing, whereas Virgil was aware of what was missing and tailored his life around it. Changing Sue's vision did not change her life in any profound way, whereas changing Virgil's vision removed him from his essential zone of familiarity.

This led me to consider the effects of "experimenting" with one's vision.  Does one need a visual baseline in order to be positively affected by eyesight changes?  What is the ideal platform of vision capacity/incapacity for experimentation?

The Observer

I think it is difficult to write on such matters as vision because what I am gradually learning in class is that I do not think we see at all, only imagine to see what is provided to us by the dimension humans are give, that being the 3D. When we look at a screen (camera or moving picture) it’s a 2D image that we give depth to and create the illusion of 3D image. Tovee goes on to explain how the muscle controls the eye, which then determines the value of angles, and these angles capture images, more so, objects, converge them, and create something that the human observer becomes familiar with. It is more complex then that, as we all learned in the beginning of class when focusing on the biological aspect of the visual system. We are given sight, a tool to understand, manipulate, function, and most of all, survive with in this subatomic world we are all composed of. Tovee states, “So if the viewer is familiar with the size of an object, the size if its retinal image can be used to judge how far away the object is… can be judged by reference to the size of the familiar object.” (Tovee 161) The viewer scales objects to compare to a relative size he or she has seen before, which makes me wonder how the viewer can see at all when he or she is constantly comparing object’s sizes to other sizes that have no define/ given size. Each person is his or her own observer, therefore, each objects size must be different to each person, which is why there couldn’t be one exact size for each object. On top of it, there are other factors that contribute to what a viewer sees, such as linear convergence, texture gradients, shading, and of course the amount of light given to that object.

I think the clip that Sarah provided for us is a perfect example of how some of us (maybe a majority of us) see in a more common agreed upon way, while others in a unique perspective unlike anything most viewers can relate to. This can only reveal to me that each person is his or her own observer of each phenomenon within space and time. Through this, a larger reality is constructed by individual realities combined together. These realities contribute into a more productive reality that many of us are familiar with, because either we contribute to this reality or it affects the individual observer’s reality. Temple Grandin sees in pictures, very detailed pictures that the average eye cannot depict. Why is that? How can it be that a certain glitch in genetic makeup can cause one person to have an entirely new vision?  How many artists then, have or had some sort of mishap within their functioning system that gave each artist the vision to see beyond the conceptualized form? Van Gogh with schizophrenia, and De Kooning Alzheimer’s, Chuck Close with faceblindness, and I am assuming there are more artist with something particularly unique to them, but I am referring to these artists since they were in our readings. 

Most of all, I am astonished to learn that the viewer is stuck in a 3-dimension world and does not have the capacity to go beyond this dimension, simply because he or she is incapable of doing so. I wonder if artists aim to simplification because of this. Arnheim continuously refers back to theory of simplification in every chapter and I think is extremely crucial in all art forms and non-art perceptive ways of viewing life. More so, because it appears that we relate better with objects at their purest essence of form (geometric shapes) and from there can relate these objects to other objects easier. For example, to understand 3d form we begin with 2d shape of it, and gradually lead up to 3d form because in the 3d world, there is more freedom to explore these objects. However, due to being binocular creatures, when these images converge, information will be lost. Once again bringing into question the legitimacy of what one can or cannot see. Yet, I think the human compensates with this default by using one’s imagination, and through this push beyond realms that fear us, are non relatable, and most of all question life. Art questions life depending on how far the artist’s wishes to see it like this. Art is not only provided to the visual creator. I think Temple Grandin is an artist in her own right, as Oliver Sacks is. I now wonder if artists are about pushing the realms of our dimensions by the simple aim to understand the world around them. If so, then the only limits rest within our dimension.

Helpful for understanding dimension but the cartoon is a tad bit silly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOuXtONDAN0&feature=related

Space and Naive Perception

This week I was most drawn to Arheim's discussion of the figure-ground and the varying ways artists achieve the depiction of 3 dimensions on a 2-dimensional surface. I felt it was extremely impressive that Arnheim was able to formulate such a simple and concise list of different techniques artists use to create depth that was nevertheless effectively comprehensive. The chapter on Space was even arranged in a kind of hierarchy, with the most essential elements needed for minimal depth mentioned first (line, contour, and convexity/concavity to create figure-ground), followed by techniques necessary for intermediate and ambiguous depth (overlapping, transparency, deformation, and obliqueness to create isometric depth and "simplicity-over-truthfulness" depth), and followed by techniques necessary to create a vivid and seemingly-realistic perception of depth (gradients, centrality, and horizons).

Space was also heavily built from a concept Arnheim has discussed previously in Shape and Form, that being that our visual faculties unavoidably establish a figure-ground for literally any perception we experience: "there is no such thing as a truly flat two-dimensional picture" (227). We can investigate the various physical conditions which cause us to see some particular visual stimuli as being the figure and some other particular stimuli as being the ground, but we are neither able to experience the stimuli in a global way that supervenes on the figure-ground distinction nor experience some local aspect of the stimuli without instantly perceiving that aspect as either being a figure or a background (relative to its surrounding). We're always perceiving a stable state, even when we're given the impression of instability by ambiguous or dynamic percepts, such as with the Necker cube, Rubin's figure-vase, or Kitaoka's rotating snakes. Our brain and mind 'insist' on stability on multiple levels of abstraction, so it is easy to espouse the misconception that the world around us literally consists of these stable percepts, that our perceptions are a veridical representation of what is actually outside of us. There is nothing particularly special about this image, but we can only see it stably as being duck or a rabbit, rather than just a series of lines on a blank background that suggest an animal. We can imagine it as a series of lines on a blank background that suggest an animal (or actually perceive it that way, if we can avoid the Gestalt-ing effect through a lack of familiarity with small organisms, e.g. being an young baby), but even then we're still imposing on the percept the idea that the black lines are some kind of "figure" and the not-lines as some kind of "background", and even then we're still imposing that the black is made up of "lines" and the white is made up of "not-lines", etc etc.

The very discussion of the techniques used in this chapter to achieve the appearance of depth both reflect and subvert the lack of veracity in how we perceive the world around us. The folk/common sense perspective believes that we see the world more or less as it is (e.g. naive realism), and yet it is also so clearly the case that when we look at 2-dimensional visual art we might deem as "realistic", we can be profoundly unaware of how little it corresponds with physical reality. That "realistic"-looking art, more often than not, merely has to take the bare minimum of elements which are true of reality, and then (as Sarah noted in her post, and as Arnheim makes clear in the Space chapter) "deform"/"arrange"/"organize" them in ways that exploit the perspectives, biases, and preconceptions we already have about how the world looks. We consequently end up viewing even the most simplified of arrangements as looking a certain way, even if we have no fundamental reason to believe that they are that way. This is one of the major reason why I enjoy the "multiple-perspectives" way of depicting objects in art (as frequently seen in Cubist works, and in contrast to the single-point perspective), because the objects would not ever be considered realistic from the folk perspective, but are nevertheless instantly identifiable. This creates tension for someone coming from the folk perspective, because why should they be if they aren't realistic? The multiple-perspectives artist has taken human preconceptions to the extreme -- they have not only removed most of the elements which are related to reality, but also only use the bare minimum of the kind of exploitations mentioned earlier, producing objects that don't correspond well with reality but correspond just well enough with our naive perception of reality.

Perspective and Personality

 

            By applying Gestalt principles to works of art, Arnheim illuminates the intricacies, the infinite variety of delicate balances involved in sensory experience. Careful consideration of the way we see renders the familiar mysterious. Over and over again, I’m impressed by the many remarkable qualities of the mechanisms of visual perception that, in effect, prove so fundamental to experience that they are difficult to notice. After reading Arnheim’s discussion of Space I recalled this passage from his chapter on Movement:

We cannot see a child grow up or a man grow old; but if we meet an acquaintance after a lapse of time, we can in a split second see him grow tall or shrivel in a kind of stroboscopic motion between a memory trace and the percept of the present moment.

            Evidently the speed of change to which our sense organs respond has been keyed during evolution to that of the kind of event whose observation is vital to us. It is biologically essential that we see people and animals move from one place to another; we do not need to see the grass grow. (384)

Time moves on and the world changes at a rate that often exceeds our ability to discern its transformation. Perhaps it moves too slowly or too quickly, but fundamentally it is somehow too familiar. We who live within it may grow too attached to the world we know. In the realm of history and society, however, the world we know may seem very different from the world we need. How do our needs change? How do we see something new? Moreover, how do we reveal that new vision in such a way that others might see it too?

            There are gigantic questions. I raise them in this blog post because I was amazed by how much our perception of space especially resonates with our relationship to culture and society. Perspective proves fundamentally specific. I felt myself to be truly a citizen of the Western world when I read Arnheim’s far-reaching discussion of central perspective. As he writes, “Central perspective, however, is so violent and intricate a deformation of the normal shape of things that it came about only as the final result of prolonged exploration and in response to very particular cultural needs” (Arnheim 283). To think of central perspective as a deformation rather than a “sophisticated” organization of visual space employed to render a “realistic” image was at first startling to me, but upon reflection, proved frank and useful. How useful to consider what we cause when we act upon material, when we compose a vision, be it artistic or otherwise; we manipulate space to serve a need that is inextricably bound to our social, cultural, historical moment. It’s also inextricably bound to our personal sensory and emotional experience.

            The force of personality in perception seems particularly relevant to a discussion of space. The way we integrate the elements with which an artist has structured her work depends on who we are. As I write this I wonder if this is simply a continuation of my Western perspective that acknowledges, “the fact that this world is being sighted” by individuals (Arnheim 294). Still, the force of personality is exactly what brings about such far-reaching changes as the revolution of central perspective that prompted artists to create new infinities of experience, discussions and contradictions by taking the step of “include[ing] a statement on the nature of infinity” in their work (Arnheim 297). What’s most interesting to me is the particular, and particularly strong, personalities of the artists who brought about such vast change, change which redefined people’s perception of the work not as existing somehow in-tact but “as a process of happening” (Arnheim 298). Brunelleschi, whose crowning achievement is the Dome in Florence, was a misfit. Society perceived him as threatening and even crazy until his imagination, talent, genius, dedication won out—albeit after long and, at times, painful struggle. What is the nature of a personality that sees new solutions and possibilities and persists in seeing them until he manages to show others too? What is this need to see more than what is known and familiar?

            The experience of reading Arnheim teaches us how seeing more depends on looking within the known and familiar to observe universal properties then responding to this knowledge creatively—the artistic space’s freedom from the laws of physical reality makes it the ideal place in which to undertake this work. This is the work of the imagination, another space, particular to each personality that provides us with the freedom to use knowledge creatively. No wonder we seem to have clung to this capacity in spite of the dangerous mechanical/ “realist” development of central perspective (Arnheim 284). Yet the capacity to imagine is dependent upon our personality which rests upon our past experience and sensory perception. Universal principles may apply but not every person may see what’s there. Perspective may be, in the words of Andre Bazan, ‘the original sin of Western painting,’ may represent the loss of our innocence because it forces us to acknowledge that we are not innocent, but responsible for our knowledge, responsible for what we see. Our knowledge, however, is also limited, imperfect, and perhaps deformed. That can be a hard thing to acknowledge for it forces us to accept that we are by turns violent and vulnerable and therefore need each other.

We need “misfit” personalities who recognize a need not only for something more, something new, but also personalities who can see what right in front of us. In Arnheim’s discussion of the Ames house he explains that we exhibit a preference for a regular right-angled room with people of “unnatural size” over “normal sized” people in a deformed room; this preference is not dependent upon past experience, which recoils at both options, but universal laws of simplicity (Arnheim 275). How we respond to the Ames room is, in a certain, sense dependent upon past experience, however. While perceptual rules may apply to us all it takes a personality of a certain inclination, training, experience, and perspective to truly see and understand what’s happening in that room. Ames and Arnheim are such people and they’ve taught others a great deal. Temple Grandin is a more complicated example since her perspective is influenced by autism. Her unique personality and perspective renders her vision free of the clouds of social pressure or particular attachments to past experience. I love the scene in the biopic of her life in which she solves the puzzle of the Ames house. We see the value of a variety of personalities. Much as we may try to reconcile infinite variety with universal principles we need the intense particularity of experience that forms specific personality in order to see what’s in front of us all.

Here’s a link to the scene from that film on YouTube: 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chxCNEsu3YU

Space, Reality, and Three-dimensional Art

Just as I have done with many of the concepts Arnheim discusses, I found myself asking is space real? Does it exist independently or only in the context of other elements? What does the word space mean? We can only begin to understand what space is because we are still not entirely sure why we perceive it the way we do. It really is fascinating that all optical input/projections on our retina are two-dimensional, yet our perception is three-dimensional. It is extremely difficult to imagine anything in a truly two-dimensional state. Take for example the woodcut by Hans Arp on page 235. I initially viewed this as a flat, target-like image on a wall. Yet even before I read the description, I started to see a black background and white ring, and then switched it to a black ring on a white background. As I read the description I could see the various planes of depth. I found it helpful to visualize the black and white areas as “mountains”, “canyons”, and “islands”. I don’t think it is a coincidence that I naturally gravitated towards these images, which are concrete examples of depth and spatial arrangement in my visual memory.

Furthermore, when we look at a photograph, technically the paper is two-dimensional, but it is impossible to not see any various planes of depth—impossible to not understand the three-dimensional world it represents. I never thought I would say this, but geometry is like art, at least in this way: geometry sets out to understand reality through representation. In order to solve a problem we draw lines and points—or at least representations of lines and points. In order to be truly one-dimensional, a line cannot have width or height, and a point cannot have length, width, or height (zero-dimensional). The pencil mark alone has measurable length, width, and height—arguably because we see it that way. We have evolved to see in three-dimensions, and personally it hurts my head when I try to fathom space in a two-dimensional or 4+ dimensional world. Still, geometry strives to represent reality and analyzes many of the same concepts art does. Crazy stuff.

This chapter really tied up any loose ends I had. In the middle of realizing all of this (freaking out over the possibility that nothing is “real”), I suddenly connected this chapter to something we read at the beginning of the semester (Sachs perhaps?). It was about how blind people perceive space differently—constructed through time rather than visually. I believe space is real—in that it exists because we construct it. So this is to say that if we could perceive four or five dimensions, we would see things in a completely different way. Seeing, perhaps meaning finally understanding the many unanswered how’s and why’s of our world equally as it means physically seeing. As a seeing person, space is nearly inseparable from visual experience. I say that space exists for blind people (but that they experience it differently) because I see space—because the blind live in my visual world. Why do I see space and depth? Is it because I can see color, because I can see light, because I can see brightness and contrast which gives shape to objects, because I can see various forms of these shapes…

Two-dimensional drawings that depict three-dimensional reality usually shows scenes that are real/ spatially achievable relationships. Such art simulates a “photographic” representation of nature (only one viewpoint), and it does not allow us to see the scene from different vantage points or to view objects from various sides. However, pattern can be used to alter our judgment of a geometric shape in illusionary art. It can depict a three-dimensional scene, which could not occur in reality. This creative art is created and appreciated by the best mathematicians and artists.

M. C. Escher:

Over break I visited the Annenberg Space forPhotography. Part of the Digital Darkroom exhibition showcased 3-D art. It made me think a lot about how we perceive space and about 3-D photography being a purely perceptual form of art. "3-D photograph exists only in the mind of the viewer. When I see a piece of sculpture or a painting , there's a physical thing sitting out there. But that 3-D photograph only exists while the person is viewing it"-- David Kuntz.

Here is the (2-D format) video from the website:

http://www.annenbergspaceforphotography.org/video-gallery/digital-darkroom/3

Claudia Kunin Christopher Schneberger

Also, a link to the online gallery:

http://www.annenbergspaceforphotography.org/slideshow/digital-darkroom-3D-print-gallery

Check it out. A lot of what they talk about is related to what we are learning in class. And understanding the history and process of 3-D art is really interesting.

Of Paintings and Poems

In Response to the Readings for April 4th

Because the perspective of a painting reveals the painter’s priorities, by nature revealing and occluding certain objects to the viewer, the perspective dictates the relationship between the viewer and the painting. Reading Arnheim’s description of this was exciting. The discussion of oblique lines, convergence, etc. is visually informative, but emotionally meaningless. To learn that their gestalt implies a concept to the viewer, a relationship with intellectual and existential qualities, was uplifting. It meant that shapes can mean something on a level higher than visual, and it meant that all the paintings I’ve seen have unknowingly “positioned” me. And the positions have implications of their own. Arnheim cites The Last Supper, which accepts us graciously into the event, with wide divergent arms, while also the arms lead back to Christ, explaining to the viewer who it is we are lucky to see. The understanding of perspective’s power is like gaining insight into a visual God, who from behind-the-scenes assures that seemingly self-contained lines and gradients actually mean something else, very potent, vital to where we stand. It is a spatial variation on “everything happens for a reason.”

A painting in two-dimensional perspective, Arnheim says, works by “generously exposing all its content to [the viewer’s] exploration but at the same time excluding him” (294). This got me to thinking about the similarities between a painting and a poem. The two mediums are related, of course, because the artist controls the work of art up to its finish; she makes artistic decisions regarding what to display, and what to occlude or leave up to the viewer’s imagination. She decides how separate the work of art is from its hypothetical viewer. Perhaps in sculptural or architectural work, there is more opportunity for a participant’s physical interaction or immersion in the piece. However when it comes to paintings and poems, the work of art is usually “done,” in its final stage and unchangeable by the viewer’s touch. (They are unchangeable because the viewer’s destructive touch, e.g. scribbling on a poem or ripping a painting, destroys the work’s essence and thus no longer is it a matter of the true work. There is no work, nothing for the viewer to be “in relation to.” Sculpture and architecture do allow for physical immersion while still preserving the work.) Thus the poet and painter must position the work, consciously or not, in relation to a viewer, taking into consideration that the only interaction available to the viewer is his cognitive process.

Perhaps the writing within a poem, or the imagery of the painting, is very explanatory, containing a self-sufficient set of information that requires no “gap-filling” or interpretation by the viewer, who is excluded. Or perhaps the viewer very included—powerful, even necessary to the work, when it comes to interpreting a word or shape; when it comes to reading at a decided rhythm, or moving the eye along the canvas in what direction; when it comes to relating the facts of the work to one another in order to process the story, that chronology within the spatial. These are powers given or withheld from the viewer, and it means that even when the viewer is powerless (as in the dimensionally rigid and self-sufficient Egyptian drawings), the viewer has a position, and that this is true at all, is as significant and instrumental as whatever the position implies.

After reading Toveé’s explanation of personal, peripersonal, and extrapersonal space, I was affirmed by how our spatial relationship to an object is a deeply rooted force in our visual systems. Its pull at such a neural level makes understandable why we infer so much from our positioning. We infer things about ourselves from viewing Last Supper, whose central perspective includes and acknowledges us: we are in the room, deserving of the scene but not a part of it; we are standing up, we are welcomed, and we are aligned directly with Christ. These implications imply things to us about us, who we are and what we are doing in a scene. This is true, of course, if we are viewing a painting and are wholly immersed in its scene, forgetting that it is a painting—perhaps this occurs when we’ve completed the cognitive process, and there is nothing left to position.

It’s helpful for me to translate the artistic choice and the artistic experience from painting to poetry, because my mind operates more naturally and enjoyably in the mode of language. I think the fact that this is possible, this translation of artistic discussion between the two modes, says something about the pervasiveness of the artistic process. The following is a poem by Heather Christle, entitled I Am Coming Over. Here the poem’s acknowledgement of the reader, the deep awareness of his existence and qualities and position, is akin to “central perspective,” as in the gracious inclusion of the viewer of The Last Supper.

I Am Coming Over

What you do is you have a what if

and then you go what is the consequence

so it is basically really easy

or also you can complain

like you can go this penis

doesn’t make sense here

and then they have to move it

somewhere else

like go stand in the hallway

and move your penis around

in a slow uneven circle

that you are imagining

in your fresh mind

like you are inside it

and I am like I like that part

because I am also inside it

and you are showing me around

and in one hand I am holding

a glass of Dr. Pepper

and the other one is pointing

at what makes you different

and special and it is a physical thing

which I am going to touch it

Alison Adams

Art & Visual Perception

Elizabeth Johnston

Long Blog Post: Readings for 3/14

         I found this article “Motion, emotion, and empathy...” on the interaction between our emotions and works of art really interesting. It certainly got me thinking about the way that I react to art and the feelings that art can provoke and why that happens.

         Freedberg and Gallese say that: “Even when the image contains no overt emotional component, a sense of bodily resonance can arise. These are all instances in which beholders might find themselves automatically simulating the emotional expression, the movement or even the implied movement within the representation" (pg. 197). I thought about this statement for a while and tried to think back to some reactions I've had to paintings in the past. I don't think that I've ever been aware of a bodily resonance or physical reaction to a painting but I don't doubt that its possible.

          Freedberg and Gallese also say that: “When we see the body part of someone else being touched or caressed or when we see two objects touching each other, our somatosensory cortices are activated as if our body were subject to tactile stimulation. Empathetic feels can no longer be regarded as a matter of simple intuition and can be precisely located in the relevant areas of the brain that are activated both in the observed and in the observer.” I often do feel this when looking at movies or advertisements- that I want to be what doing what I see. And even Livingstone talked in Chapter 10 about how advertisements are able to use certain techniques to catch our attention. And this thought alone with this quote showed me that its really possible to evoke feelings of empathy and need in others in art if the right techniques are used.

          One of my favorite quotes from the article was: “We propose that even the artist’s gestures in producing the art work induce the empathetic engagement of the observer, by activating simulation of the motor program that corresponds to the gesture implied by the trace. The marks on the painting or sculpture are the visible traces of goal-directed movements; hence, they are capable of activating the relevant motor areas in the observer’s brain.” The way that they described the sense of movement we can feel when looking at the strokes of a Jackson Pollock painting was not something I really took into account much before I read this. This made me think about my last long blog post about how art is not about the finished product and rather about the journey the artist takes to get there. This even took it one step further in claiming that we gain a sense of movement by paying close attention to the detail of the skill the artist put into each stroke. Creating a painting is a “goal-oriented action” and because of this we think back to how the artist went about creating that goal. There are so many feelings that art can evoke and this article showed me that there is so much more to it than just that.

Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience

I am convinced by Freedberg and Gallese’s argument that the artist’s gesture or mark creates empathetic engagement for the viewer but I cannot say the same for the authors’ description of bodily engagement. There was very little evidence for this concept. What studies or experiences are they citing in connection to physically feeling the movements or intentions of figures of an image or painting? I think that we can identify with emotions expressed in a painting and at times feel empathy for the bodily sensations represented. But I am not convinced by the suggestion that my body parts will physically respond in regards to seeing something occurring to a representation of another body. I understand the studies of mirror neurons show that a response may be occurring on a neurological level, but never have I felt that physically while looking at a work of art.

The Feelings You've Felt Before

As far as evolutionary science is concerned, it is a stated fact that we, as humans, use prior memories to inform our current situations. In nature as modern day hunter gatherers in both giant metropolis cities and urban farm settings, categorically stored experiences and memories are essential to daily survival. What is perceived by the mind becomes stored, and possibly either relived or remembered at a later date. 

In class upon discussing the paper "Visual Art and the Brain" by Anli Liu and Bruce L. Miller, we discussed both Utermohlen's self portraits throughout his dementia, and  also Willem de Kooning's later works. We also discussed, some dimentia patients (frontotemporal dementia?) and people with left hemisphere damagewho often become upsessed with art without any previous specific interest in the form itself. 

This led me to do a little more research into De Kooning himself, and left me to think a bit more on the idea of a "return to simplicity" in art as the artist grows older and gains experience. De Kooning himself said that "It seems like a lot of artists, when they get older, they get simpler." This really resonated personally with my many of my experiences in music and spending time around aging artists.  I've had many conversations and even in my own experience have felt a shift towards simplicity in composition. As one finds a specific style, that style is crafted and then re-tailored into the dimensions of that specific artists "style."

When looking at dementia patients, Liu and Miller, describe the "the ingenuity of the brain" as a having an strong capacity to compensate for whatever perception is missing. Although all those memories must be intact somewhere, it seems more like the key is lost and that trigger has been shown using music (to be similar to muscle memory,) but it seems almost innate that visual art should cue up similar sets of memories being that the visual experience is also clearly also an emotional one. 

                 I think that any given experience we may have calls upon many more experiences than we realize are being called upon. We immediately sift through these experiences, and automatically re-categorize everything else. It's also funny that, in our thought process, often times it's the funny or stand-out moments which tend to gravitate to the top of the list, granted many of these experiences first called upon are at the top of the list for a reason, they've either happened before or, have previous insight into what's happening at that moment.

Interesting....

I just thought that this was an interesting photo to look at, considering what we talked about last week and what we saw in this week's Arnheim reading....
Arnheim says: "If a face is turned sideways, the nose will be perceived as upright in relation to the face but as tilted relative to the entire picture. The artist must see to it not only that the desired effect prevails, but also that the strength of various local frames of reference is clearly proportioned; they must either compensate one another or be subordinated to one another hierarchically. Otherwise the viewer will be confronted with a confusing crossfire" (Arnheim, pg. 101).
-Alison

Twelve Parts

 

Form to no Form

The Buddhist believe that no art can be created without the experience of experience itself, for art is the closest way to represent the inner truth and practicing of these experiences. Yet, no one can simply begin without the practice of self realization of experiences the self has gone through.  I heard this idea from a close friend of mine, and it stayed with me because if three clear, sharp words: experience, self, and truth.

If I am to say that art should aspire in the realm of experience, self, and truth, then I have to question what these terms mean. Each interpretation will depend on the subjective belief of the person who questions these ideas; therefore, I encourage the thought to express itself within the person on his or her own account. Each individual is unique because of the experience he or she has flowed through, and his or her genetic make up that allow these experiences to evolve. As an individual grows, other aspects of life find their paws into the person’s experience. I refer this to one’s environment; the environment determines the influence of the experience on the self. 

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Last night I attended a concert that asked of me one thing, and that was to let go. Letting go is not an easy task to experience because it demands a lot from the inner self. It asks you to stop, point blank, and awaken your senses. The place that I went was a sort of wear house facility created in the 1870s for Aesthetic movements to have a place to exhibit various works of art. That is what the brochure sates. As we (I went with a friend) entered the building, someone asked me to show our tickets and said to progress forward into a large hall split in half by a projection screen. We were to sit on the floor, which was covered by a few old carpets, on these black sort of lounge chairs that rested on the floor, and were extremely comfortable, which I hoped since it would be a 5 hour concert. In front of me would be where the eight musicians would sit, and behind me was a stadium like seating, except nicer. I’ve been to other classical concerts before, but never so open as this one. Everyone huddled together, shoes off, chatting, waiting patiently for what was about to happen in this enormous building. And just like that the eight musicians entered and my entire self disappeared. For about 30 min, I think because I have no idea, I was in a trance. In front of me, close enough for me to stand up and walk a few steps was Philip Glass and Michael Reidman, and the rest of Philip Glass Ensemble. My trance was not due to being awe struck, but simply by letting go of my inner self to listen, and through listening became closer to something not understandable to me, but that I could feel through the inner self I had let go of  to connect to what I was experiencing. 

Passion, vulnerability, fear, happiness, joy. My emotions trying to find their way out, but unable to because they had nowhere to go. All was fine until this morning when I sat down, and asked myself what I would right as I flipped through chapter 3. Nothing came. All that I experienced only 10 or so hours before rushed backed, and I think – connection.

So I referred back to Arnheim on this thought. 

Before I came to the concert, I was reading Arnheim and he brought up a few times the significance of a concept in both the artist and the viewer. How the percept must be associated to the viewer’s conscious within their experience, and that with out this, an artwork will be meaningless. This is how I interpreted his idea. August Macke said, “Man expression has life in forms. Each form of art is an expression of his inner life.” (Fineberg 49) In this sense, man must connect to form because through a visual representation of form he can begin to understand the work shown to him. Yet, Kindinsky took a form that one would normally be accustomed to seeing or have some previous reference to, and break its narrative by exploiting its recognizable shape. The viewer has to confront not the form, but the idea of the form buried in the unconscious of the viewer. In his own word he states:

“Skillful use of a word (according to poetic feelings) – an internally necessary repetition of the same word twice, three times, many times – can lead not only to the growth of the inner sound, but also bring light still other, unrealized spiritual qualities of the word. Eventually, manifold repetition of a word (a favorite  childhood game, later forgotten) makes it lose its external sense of the name. in this way, even the sense of the word as an abstract indication of the object is forgotten, and only the pure sound of the word remains. We may also, perhaps unconsciously, hear this ‘pure’ sound at the same time as we perceive the real, or subsequently, the abstract object. In the latter case, however, this pure sound comes to the fore and exercises a direct influence upon the soul.” (Finebery 62)

I purposely did not listen to Music in Twelve Parts because I was curious to feel the sensation of what I was to experience without having experienced it before hand by listening the piece on a cd or internet. I was curious to see if I could transport myself without having to have a previous experience of the sensation due to familiarity. Here I would agree, to a point, with Arnheim that if I did have some previous association with the piece it would have been a more powerful connection because at times I found myself confused to what I was listening to. Yet, this was not a necessity that I needed to have. All I needed was myself. My own experience (which I could say is the association he is stating) and the trust to say “here, here is me, I, your audience, am willing to take the journey you ask of me.” I can tie this train of thought to Rothko, which happen to be the anniversary of his death (suicide) the night of the concert, and the similar connections that Glass and Rothko have. I am not saying that Rothko was a minimalist, but more that his most honest works had no form. He did have you, the viewer. He did have balance, and yes color, but that was his biggest trick on the viewer, to be able to capture you through color, not form, and the rest he had to weal you in just enough so you would let go and transport yourself. I am left questioning as to whether I need percept to do this, to run away into the world the artists wants me to feel? A world that might be closer to my own then realized by simply letting go of my on percept.

Experience, truth, self

Can you only be true to the self once it is willing to let go in order to have an experience? And if this is so, does form apply anymore if the artist wishes to take you beyond the very elements he or she uses as the medium to transport you?

Art is truth when the experience of the artist is true to him/ herself, and that happens through experience, and that experience happens through the practice of simply living, of being within the environment our culture surrounds us with. It is not an excuse to say that because one wishes the viewer to experience the raw emotion, whatever it is, can be nothing more that. This is the problem I have with a lot of art I see. I have to battle with deciding what of it is the truth versus the thought without the truth of the artist.  Or as Arnheim stated, “When the contact with a full range of human experience is lost, there results no art, but formalistic play with shapes or empty concepts.” (p. 148) He is right.

I try to find myself disagreeing with Arnheim but in doing so I start to understand more of what I think he is telling me. Arnheim makes it clear that there a two concepts that the visual artist has to take into account; that being what kind of projection will lead to what kind of percept, and what principles operate the mechanisms to do so. The striving idea or percept the artist is conveying has to be there and the medium the artist uses to develop it.  Without the relationship between these two concepts, connection becomes extremely difficult to discover.

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I feel more lost then before because I felt. I saw before me more then musicians playing but sounds of curiosity of being, of living. To connect in this world of ours, we have to learn how to be honest with ourselves if we are to be honest with another self being. What is it we are searching for? Connection is all around us but even then, to connect is foreign. I mean to truly connect. What does each letter of that word transform itself into? I think all of us would be able to agree on a definition and understanding of the word connect. Take it apart – c o n n e c t – each letter slightly loses it hold. Separate it even further – c     o    n        n    e      c      t   - and I see letters. I am still able to put the letters together and form the word, but it feels foreign. What I am trying to say is that words used, pictures drawn, music created have to go beyond the definition of the concept it prevails to us. Is has to be disembodied and re-put together, and it has to be repeated so many times that in that very instinct, a connected flashes pulses into an unconscious that is tender to the self, and the inner sound of the person is left bare. I think out of all this, this is what Arnheim might be trying to help us understanding when reading detailed chapters on each aspect of visual perception of art. To take each concept for what it is engrained in us, and trust the artist just enough to experience that connection.

If so, then art is the most powerful tool man has created for he cannot even understand his own creation

Blog post 2

Though created prior to the Renaissance and its extreme focus on perspective, Simone Martini’s Annunciation demonstrates some of the principles Arnheim discusses. This work was the first to come to mind when I read the passage in which Arnheim discusses different ways in which the artist may portray an onlooker within the painting, how he may capture the symmetry or frontality of the thing seen both in the eye of the viewer of the painting and in that of the depicted viewer. Arnheim uses the example of an evangelist writing in a book, suggesting that many Medieval artists strive to portray the man viewing the book and the book viewed full frontally with respect to the viewer; Martini, though a Medieval artist, goes quite another route in Annunciation. The bible in which the Virgin’s hand is placed is neither facing her nor the viewer, despite the fact that she herself is depicted in a relatively frontal manner with respect to the viewer. Perhaps the obliqueness of the lines forming the book serve to counteract the following effects which might make the Virgin’s thighs and torso appear smaller than the rest of her body: the (very slight) foreshortening effect of the tilt of her knees forwards from a seated position on her thighs; the overlapping effect of her hands, structures which place her abdomen in the background; and the flatness of the dark fabric of her robe, the only area of the work denied any shading or depth. Mary’s bible, in resting in such an unnaturally oblique form, follows the perspective of the overall image: the extremely oblique lines in marble on the floor suggest a vanishing point somewhere behind the Virgin’s robe. In having the book in a position relatively parallel to these lines in marble, it emphasizes the existence of this vanishing point even in the context of her robed body. In other words, although without the presence of the bible the area “behind” Mary’s robe may be perceived as small or flat because of its flatness of color and shading, the foreshortening of her thighs, and the lack of shading in the robe, the existence of this strangely positioned text points to a vanishing point behind her robe, an area approximately behind her womb. With the addition of the bible in this unusual position, Martini turns what lies beneath her flat black robe into an infinite and unknowable area: the point of convergence which the background does not allow us to see. 

After thinking about Arnheim’s analysis of La Source, in which he praises Ingres’s use of formal shapes in conveying a fluid image, I looked at the work of one of my favorite photographers, Julia Fullerton-Batten, who uses highly stylized, abstracted, unnatural configurations of the human body to convey essential and universal human truths (at least I think so). In this photo, taken of a real mother and daughter pair, Fullerton-Batten stages and lights the daughter in such a way that a clear vertical axis dissects her body: it begins at the part, continues to break her face into symmetrical halves (one light, one dark), moves downwards to her elbow, and ends with her top knee, which is then punctuated by the most luminant yellow lemon in the photograph. The girl’s body is not symmetrical across this axis, her left side she caving into the background behind her mother’s knees, leaving only her folded hands and streaks of hair on the right. This emptiness on her right side is exaggerated by the fact that her calves are not visible at all; her legs appear to be abruptly cut off at the knees. The effect of this imbalance and asymmetry is that the girl looks almost as if she is melting into her mother, leaning into the background space created by her mother’s presence in the foreground. The nearly nude girl becomes visually hidden or sheltered by her mother in more ways than this: the mother’s hand literally eclipses the daughter’s neck, and her maternal gaze creates a direct, straight line into her daughter’s arms, which in turn shield her body. Also notable is the fact that the girl’s left side, close to the mother, is shaded and protected from the light source which shines from the right. In this image, like Christ’s eyes from the Durer discussed at the end of Arnheim’s chapter, every line, every formal element supports the meaning and content of the entire image; in this case, each line, each curve, and each angle within the girl’s body suggests her reliance on her mother for shelter and protection. 

Since Fullerton-Batten has done extensive work on females in adolescence, it is not surprising that she choses again to capture this tense and fraught stage; however, this image perhaps is notable because it is one of her very few which suggest any sort of solace or protection from the confusion of adolescence. In contrast to the photos in her cleverly named series Awkward, this image allows some relief for this girl in the form of her mother. The almost absurd overlapping within the girl’s body creates a tension which is alleviated in the ease of the mother’s body: while the girl reaches her left arm across her body to her right side, the mother simply uses her right arm to reach to her right (as Arnheim suggests when discussing an ancient Egyptian image, there is more conflict and complexity in an arm which reaches across the body than one which does not).