Vision and Art

"There are many things as an artist you can’t discover or explain by yourself along the way, like how a bright colour can appear to be lighter than it is, or the science behind making your picture look as if something is receding. Margaret Livingstone explains tricks of the eye: questions of luminance, depth and colour; and does so in terms of our vision system. All the time painters have a challenge of expressing something that is three dimensional, on the surface of their canvas, which is flat. That is one of the big clues about Vermeer’s technique related to the possible use of a lens. His images do seem particularly flat. Some of his paintings feature little shapes that almost touch, which make no sense really; but if you had both eyes open, and could be in Vermeer’s studio, and could see what he saw, then you’d see the depth. But his paintings appear to be made by looking with only one eye. The abstraction of shapes eventually leads your mind to understand that there’s space between some things- one example is the Woman with a Lute , and the map in the background. Her head and fingerboard almost touch the map holder, yet must be some distance away. The colour part of Livingstone’s book is quite fascinating, particularly where she is talking about how tones can appear the same in a black and white photograph, but how very differently they read in a colour version of the same image. This is a lesson taken particularly to heart by the Impressionists, who were much more interested in colour relationships than differences in dark and light. Their pictures are very difficult to read in black and white but make complete sense in colour. “Vermeer would not have thought of painting in neuroscientific terms; but he intuitively understood these things himself.” However, Vermeer’s pictures work very well in black and white, because of the strong tonal plans that he put down at the very beginning of his picture. We can see that he followed this up with a lot of quite dull colours. He placed his bright paint sparingly, and with great forethought, at a later stage. His paintings are not just images of moments seen. They are very well planned and structured. Livingstone explains that you can understand some images in monochrome really well. She tells us that colour is actually processed in a completely different part of your brain. This was very interesting to me, because my experiments indicate that a dark print from an image projected by a camera obscura lens could be used as an under-painting on a light canvas, and then colour could be ‘mapped’ as a separate step, out in the studio. Also, Livingstone shows how a shape that may read as black in one visual context is actually lighter than something we might read as a shade of white in another part of a picture. That happens in Vermeer too: a black tile that’s quite far back in the picture plane is actually lighter than a white tile that’s closer to us, which is extraordinary really. She writes about the way that black-and-white checkerboard patterns can create an illusion of depth on a flat surface, and explains ways in which artists ‘trick themselves’ into seeing the world as flat, in order to make it easier to put information on their drawing or painting surface. Vermeer would not have thought of painting in neuroscientific terms; but he intuitively understood these things himself. “You couldn’t just squeeze paint out of a tube, you had to go and grind it yourself first.” In fact, it is quite possible he used a number of different techniques in his paintings. Not just using a lens, but strings and perspective drawing tools, preparatory sketches, and painting by eye. He had to wait for every layer of his painting to dry before adding the next. Each had its purpose, and its particular set of pigments. Painters of the time only occasionally mixed colours- mostly, they used paint in its pure state, one colour on top of the other. So in order to get a green, you’re not actually mixing yellow with blue, you’re putting blue down, then putting yellow on top of it, and that’s a very different way of painting than we find now. Looking at studio methods of Vermeer’s time certainly made me think about how difficult it was to paint then: what hard work it was, how slow it was, and how much preparation was needed. You couldn’t just squeeze paint out of a tube, you had to go and grind it yourself first. You wouldn’t want to waste anything and you’d have to really organize things. Painters today have this extraordinary array of materials that Vermeer just didn’t have. What it makes you think is, ‘well how would his paintings look if he was working now?’ Would his pictures be as beautiful? I wonder whether they would, because I think sometimes, less is more for a painter. You know if you have to make do with only limited materials, then probably you’ll push them as far as you can; and I think that’s what Vermeer did. The real debate for many has been whether using a camera obscura somehow diminishes Vermeer’s position as a great master of painting. This is the question that has upset so many art historians. But using a lens in the way I suggest does not get in the way of his brilliance: it just becomes one of the many tools at his disposal. And he, like many other painters before and since, probably experimented with what was available to him, and used whatever he could, to best effect."