Random Writes.

A Rant with Perspective

Part 2.

And now teaching again after a five year break, has been thoroughly enjoyable I have felt relaxed and comfortable. That is until last week when a sense of weakness caused me to go completely against my, usually sound teaching instincts. I decided that my keen students after several mutually enjoyable lessons (doing it my way) needed a proper perspective lesson.

The first dodgy sign was over preparation, I have always been passionate about teaching and thoroughly enjoy preparing, especially, reworking and updating familiar subjects. And to begin with as I revisited the theory of expressing 3 dimensional things 2 dimensionally, I was pleasantly surprised, a distinct feeling that I had moved on and could easily assimilate a projected conceptual construction into the lesson but as the time drew nearer, I felt anxious.

The lesson began very positively, me brandishing great visual aids as I showed and demonstrated vanishing points, one, two and even three point perspectives, all in easily digestible bite-size pieces. The students were keen and the first exercise was a two dimensional hand-out which they duly and correctly thought through and placed all the construction lines in the right places, it was thrilling…

And then we looked at real boxes and again things began well, it was all there in my head…until…getting carried away I stacked three boxes all at different angles to each other and tried to begin construction from a fixed view point. It was horrendously complicated and I suspect even Leonardo would have had trouble. I struggled on and staring hard at my little boxes as all logic dribbled away and I could made no sense of it whatsoever. I felt like Miranda when she turns intimately to camera and says, “I have absolutely no idea where I am going with this…” except that it wasn’t funny. My students were embarrassed, fidgety and lost. Eventually I pulled on the last rags of dignity and somehow managed to draw the bloody boxes and then impose the construction lines afterwards, which at least proved the theory.

And that seems to be the point, in my “Eureka” moment I understood that this mental construction that we know works, is nevertheless a separate thing, similar to comparative measuring where you shut one eye, hold out your pencil and take a measurement and then on your paper you make another parallel, relative measurement, the first measurement is a different scale and non-transferable (**) it is its own separate thing. And so it is with the rules of perspective if you let them into your head while you are drawing or take them too seriously, they will block out what is actually there and get in the way of your precious visual curiosity, exploration and final understanding.

If I have learnt anything from this salutary experience it is to trust my instinct that says perspective can help you understand your position in relation to an object.

It is just a point of view.

No more “true” than photography or holograms. So I am putting it in its place at the very far reaches of my brain and will begin each new drawing with a humble nothingness, prepared to discover something I don’t yet know.

** Except for sight-size.

A Rant with Perspective.

Part 1.

These views are entirely my own, I make no apologies for what follows…

Some noble but misguided notion lead me well and truly off piste last week with regard to the subject of my Wednesday drawing class. It has been a while since I gave much thought to my old frenemy: perspective. We go back a long way but we’ve never have liked each other much.

Until I became a professional artist, by which I mean showing and selling commercial painting, I had kept like a guilty secret, my avoidance of the dark art of perspective and managed to find quite adequate ways around it. “IT” seemed like a very grown-up, mathematical and secretively mystical like something akin to the Masons.

Around that time I was invited on a painting trip with a well-known artist to…Venice. To begin with I was utterly overwhelmed especially as I was daily, painting with someone who oozed perspective confidence. I began to tentatively paint the bits that stuck out of the Venetian skyline, small, unassuming dove-filled turrets. One day my painter friend with consummate 3 point perspective skills, called my bluff and insisted on teaching me and reluctantly I let her. At the time it sort of made sense, in that I began to paint buildings, lots of them and lost my fear. I realise now though that Venetian Architecture although stupendously beautiful wasn’t what inspired me, I would have been better off painting people and buildings only where they got in the way. But I was young and impressionable.

Over the next twenty years I gained a lot of teaching experience and taught perspective only as an adjunct to looking. My adult groups were richly diverse and I became fascinated with the way other people see the world and over time I saw a pattern emerge. Often (but by no means always) men liked the idea of perspective and sometimes came to class with an already extensive knowledge and a few bearing home-made Heath Robinson type alarming-looking mechanical aids. They related perspective to their drawings in a practical engineering, concerned with gravity, way. Generally speaking (*) women were more likely to favour contour and line drawing with a marked interest in surface and texture. And if that all sounds sexist well that’s how it was…

The best example of what I am talking about is the time I had in my class a technical draughtsman, highly skilled at conceptualising 3 dimensional forms and translating them into two. His resulting drawings were practical in that they were believably functional but lacked character of place, history and uniqueness. The following week in an attempt to get the students really looking I took them out into the landscape to draw and paint ancient crumbly Tudor buildings. It seemed as though, away from the college in the real world, the students had referred back to ancient default settings, the draughtsman produced competent solid box-like, all weather structures, generically Tudor, as did most of the other men to some extent, almost as if the technical parts of their brains had been triggered. The women on the other hand struggled with structure and concreteness but…the sense of crumbly ancient, lived, specific human dwelling was almost palpable especially in the details.

What one gender lacked the other seemed to exaggerate. This all started to feel like the contrast between convergent and divergent thinking styles, and set me off on a quest that I am still pursuing, which is, Could there possibly be (subtle) gendered perceptual differences?

*When I say “Generally speaking” I am referring to the 70/30 rule.

(Part 2. To follow)