by Rebecca Hyde Rowan Public Library
Artists
and scientists are interested in the act of seeing. How do we see? What do we see? Answers to those questions have changed with
discoveries in science and art.
As
a painter and art historian, James Elkins appreciates art, but curiosity has
led him into areas of science and the natural world. In his book “How to Use Your Eyes,” he offers
us a way to examine and appreciate the world around us, from the intricate to
the complex. It’s a book about “learning to see anything,” by simply stopping and taking
the time to look, and keep looking, “until the details of the world slowly
reveal themselves.”
He
divides his investigations into two large categories: things made by man and things made by
nature. Man-made includes postage stamps,
tracing their history and revealing subtle political and artistic details. The fine motorwork of a locomotive on a
United States 3 cents stamp from 1869 is barely revealed under magnification. When
Elkins looks at patterns in moths’ wings, he is looking for nature’s simple
“ground plan,” the template that is more or less shared by all butterflies and
moths. It takes practice because symmetry
is modified by the need for camouflage.
He also studies culverts, Chinese and Japanese script, fingerprints,
twigs, and sunsets.
Elkins’s
investigations into art and seeing take a different approach in his book “What
Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy.” Here he argues that science and our usual
approach to art appreciation cannot explain the act of painting. Elkins explores what an artist does in the
studio to transform paint into a painting:
thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting. The thoughts of the artist are embedded in
the paint, or “liquid thought.” And the
process of turning the thickness of paint into a picture is like the efforts of
alchemists, trying to mix and mingle ingredients to produce a purified, rare
substance. He examines the term “hypostasis,”
the concept that something as dead as paint might also be deeply alive and full
of thought. For example, a painted
window can be brilliant with light (as in Matisse’s windows open to the ocean
air), but it is also a heavy mineral deposit of paint and absolutely
opaque. Or look at the brushstrokes
that remain fixed in a painting for all to see:
material memories of the artist at work.
“Eye
of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni
van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of
Seeing,” by Laura J. Snyder, describes the use of new optical instruments in
the 1600s by scientists and artists, which changed how we perceive the
world. Snyder terms it “the invention of
the modern notion of seeing.” The notion
of the eye as an instrument, comparable to a camera obscura, fascinated artists
and scientists. The reach of sight was
extended by the telescope and microscope.
The descriptive impulse, rather than just storytelling, was pervasive
with the collection of data, specimens, and observations of the natural
world. It was the age of the artist
Vermeer, who infused his paintings with the new optical discoveries.
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