The Real Sun

It has become apparent that in the discussion of art, some art is described as more “realistic”—that is, a certain painted tree looks more like it would in reality than a non-realistically painted tree. Livingstone on page 39 describes the sun in a manipulated version of Monet’s Impressionist Sunrise as “closer to the way [the sun] would appear in reality,” because in this manipulated version, the sun’s luminance has been increased so that it is brighter than the painted sky. In reality, of course, the sun is much brighter than the sky.           

This vocabulary of discussion assumes that what Art is, is not Reality, or even a part of Reality. There is the real world—the sun, people, soda cans—and then there are paintings and sculptures of those people and cans, and these paintings are or they contain non-real worlds. But is this true certainly? Our “real” world is broadly inhabited by art and conscious creation; to discount art’s reality is to propose a world with great gaps in its actual existence.

Livingstone refers to Monet’s act of using equiluminance—painting the colors of sun and sky an equiluminant orange and blue-grey—as an “ability to represent the quality of light.” Thus, in art, a facsimile is made, and it is more effective when it closely represents the real. Perhaps this is true, in the sense of what is important to us as viewers of art. It is our instinct & priority to look for the concrete inside the abstract: we look for and find camels from clouds. And indeed it makes us more comfortable when we can discern, or at least project, an image like a face or house inside a sea of otherwise non-realistic shapes. We are even struck; it feels like the art contains something right, that the artist was successful.

This pleasing realization of the art-reality connection is also achieved through Titles. Titles can place a work entirely under one tarp of context; an ambiguous and abstract scene can instantly, according to the title, represent My Husband. Mr. I’s “Where is my hat?” was aptly named—it makes a collection of non-real shapes seem like it applies to a real-life situation, and it also comments on the human’s want to look for a hat, or something, among the shapes.

            Is the viewer’s want, for the art to contain something of reality, also the priority of the artist? In other words, is the artist always devoting his consciousness to embodying the real sun and people? It seems to vary. Certain movements are dedicated to non-reality, or certain levels and reinterpretations of reality. Jacques Louis-David’s painting seems devoted to the precise folds of a handkerchief, the actual smoothness of light on a background wall. Less devoted to reality is Eugene Delacroix in his self-portrait; it contains the obviously discernable reality of the gazing man, but in his thick and alien brushstrokes he is placing reality through a noticeably non-real lens.

            After all, the human visual system exists to process the real world—the real sun—and not Monet’s sun. Our brain processes Monet’s sun, but it can’t detect the fact that the orange and blue-grey are equiluminant, which is helpful information that would benefit us to be able to realize, without having to remove color from the image. So even if we discern the presence of a real thing in a work of art, the information we interpret will often be misleading with respect to the qualities of that object: the sun is actually brighter in real life. That’s our visual system’s fault, that we don’t see how Impressionist Sunrise is very far from reality.

            But sometimes it’s the painter’s fault, or goal—he intentionally paints a purple apple. There’s a thrill for that artist. It’s an intentional subversion of reality, or of our unconscious desire for reality. “You wanted a red apple? You don’t get one,” the painting/painter says. Van Gogh said of his Night Café that he “tried to express the terrible passion of men by means of red and green,” (Arnheim 359). So he was striving to say something about reality (human passion) in non-real world (Night Café). Reality was at least partly his priority, whether consciously or not. But we also know Night Café is not reality because Van Gogh apparently did not care about the non-realistic strokes of the lamp-halo, or the non-realistic loom of the pool table: he accepted them. What’s more, he could have intended them.

            Reality, then, is always pulsing through a work of art, either because the artist consciously makes it so, and/or the viewer discovers it instantly. Or, the viewer searches for it and finds it/projects it. And if there is no reality—nothing the viewer can relate to the physical world or especially human existence—then there is a noticeable longing for it, a lack.

When we learn surprising things about reality from art, it is successful. We know humans get sad—an uncomplicated for a complex range of emotions, yes, but a portrait of a face that doesn’t show any combination of features we haven’t seen before, is unsurprising and leaves us with little. But a portrait of a common lightpost portrayed as sad, might move us deeply. The artist has paid close enough attention to the real world to realize a previously unexpressed aspect of it; this, we are willing to believe regardless of how sad lightposts actually can be.

Maybe, then, art is non-Real by default, but it is successful art when some or all of this artistic non-reality is interpreted by the viewer as Real.

           

This creates the stigma of art as less than reality. It is either unnecessary or fundamentally baser. Monet’s sun is better because it seems more vibrant than the sky, as in reality; the sun steals from the goodness of the real world, the best it could hope to do. Monet’s sun is also worse than the real sun because of the sun and sky’s equiluminance, which does not occur in real life. Art can’t win—if it manages to evoke Reality, it is inherently a bastardization of it. Livingstone continues on page 39 that the sun is brighter than the sky “by a huge factor that would actually be impossible to duplicate with pigments.”

It would be philosophically correct—or at least philosophically kinder—to refer to Art as just as Real as what’s outside the picture frame; that it’s not a separate world, but rather another limb of an all-encompassing world. To do that would be kinder to art, and to do that would be to broaden our views of what is real, possible, meaningful, and allowed. But it seems that, both in our reality-based visual systems and our habits as viewers, we are meant to search for Reality, which means that somewhere there is a place that is not reality. There is not be one, omni-realistic world, until we actively change our desires.