DAVID CORWIN watercolors past paintings notes on composition bio/reviews contact |
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Abstract Traditional painters seek to achieve compositionally
balanced paintings, but the effect they seek has no name or metaphoric description.
It is characterized by words to the effect of "that's it." This pictorial
effect is described in terms of eye movements and the effect of peripheral vision.
and is called visual coherence. It is achieved through tonal balancing of the
horizontal and vertical axis and is independent of color. The result of this is
that any factor affecting the internal tonal balance of a painting will alter
or eliminate fine pictorial coherence. The effect is thought to be caused by
a relative increased stimulation of the magnocellular
visual pathway in the retina and vision centers. This is the neuropsychological explanation
of one aspect of the aesthetic effects of a painting. Key words:
Pictorial Composition, Aesthetic Neuropsychological Effect, Visual
Coherence, Luminance Balance, Tonal
Balance Magnocellular Pathway, Smooth Pursuit, Eugène Delacroix, Roger de Piles Pictorial Composition: The particular effect observed by
some critics and painters: Definition and neuropsychological explanation of
its effect. Pictorial
composition is a problem that all painters with a traditional view of
pictures confront regardless of the subject of their paintings and are often
bedeviled by. A painter will ask himself or herself whether a painting
"works." This is a typical question in traditional art schools, and
in fact, with respect to an abstract work, it is virtually the only question. Other questions such as whether the
figures and objects are drawn "correctly" always exist for those
who are interested in such matters. Similarly
opinions concerning conceptual ideas such as the need for a visually flat
effect or the need to illustrate the artistic process may be important but
are also irrelevant to this discussion.
Strolling through a traditional art school not dominated by prevailing
conceptual ideologies will reveal that students are creating work in every
possible style except perhaps Byzantine and Early Gothic. For these students the question "does this painting work?" means
whether it "works" from a purely visual point of view. The problem with the state of a painting said to "work" is that
it changes such that students of painting
may judge a painting to be wonderful
in the evening but dead and lifeless in the morning or marvelous in the
studio but not when hung at an exhibition. In the course of painting, the
work may appear to be wonderful but "incomplete." It is not infrequent
that the attempt to complete the painting somehow destroys it or causes it to
no longer "work." Perhaps a
single stroke changes the whole feeling of the painting. The earliest known discussion of
this special feeling occurs in books by Roger de Piles, a French art critic,
an artist of the early 18th century. He described "a particular feeling
evoked by a painting in which the
first impression from a distance causes a certain magical effect based on the
arrangement of colors, lights, and shadows even before being aware of the
subject of the painting." He felt that this purely visual aspect of a
painting - the initial effect and its continuation - the arrangement of forms, colors, light and
shade on the canvas was a more
important aspect of painting than the traditional concept of the arrangement
of the subject. Good composition as traditionally understood leads the eye
through the painting to discover the subject of the painting and was chiefly concerned with the subject and
how it was presented. (1) (2) Eugene Delacroix in the 1830's noted that "there is a
kind of emotion which is entirely particular to painting: nothing (in a work
of literature) gives an idea of it." He attributed this to the
arrangement of colors, lights, shadow and said: "you find yourself at too great a distance from
the painting to know what it represents; and you are often caught by that
magic accord." Delacroix was
undoubtedly referring to the same phenomena of the overall visual impression
as noted by de Piles. (3 Neither de Piles nor Delacroix or others had a name for or
gave instructions on how to achieve the effects they observed while the traditional aspects of
composition could be described and rules could be formulated to teach the
critics, public and painters how to look at paintings. It is not as if this
aesthetic experience disappeared; it has always existed for those who are
sensitive to it. There is, however, no metaphor for this visual experience or
as Delacroix said: "nothing gives an idea of it." This is important
to note because with other complex sensory experiences such as taste there is
a whole host of metaphors used to
relate the experience to other gustatory and taste sensations. Academic
pictorial composition in the 20th century with the introduction of abstract
paintings became dissociated from pictorial subject and introduced many
conceptual issues. Composition remained connected to the traditional concept
of looking at the individual parts of a painting and how they relate to each
other and in particular to pictorial balance. The concept of pictorial
balance will be discussed in some detail as this has been quite important in
relation to what was thought to be good composition. In 1903 an artist Henry Rankin Poore wrote an influential book in which he insisted that
pictorial balance had to be located at the geometric center and that this was
the key to the aesthetic effect of a painting. He maintained that this was a
center of mass type of balance in which
every object or space in a picture had a weight proportional to how far it
was from the pictorial center (4). These ideas were subsequently incorporated
into Rudolf Arnheim's extensive analysis of the
aesthetic effects of painting. Arnheim
maintained that there was a center of balance of the "field
effects" induced by depicted objects or forms in every painting which
did not necessarily correspond with the geometric center but that for a well
composed picture, this should be along either the horizontal, vertical or
diagonal axis. (5) The
existence of this center for determining an aesthetic quality of a picture ,
and its detection was a subject of much work. Locher
et al 1998 observed students of industrial design engineering as they created
images composed of geometric shapes and noted that the students' compositions
were balanced around the center (6). Locher et al in a
similar study with advanced students in an Academy of Fine Arts observed that
they did likewise (7). As Locher, 2003 summarized the problem: "balance is achieved when
the elements of a pictorial field are pitted against each other about a
balancing point or center so that the entire composition appears stable and
'visually right' (i.e., 'good')" (8)
Finally Firstov et al
2007 evaluated 1332 paintings created by "renowned Russian artists"
using a mathematical computation of centers of gravity and determined that these paintings had
centers of balance or gravity corresponding closely to the geometric
center. (9) The results of these and many other
studies indicate that, in general, people can agree on the center of balance
of a painting using an intuitive notion of a center of gravity, and that these paintings feel
"right." The implication has been that paintings, constructed with
a center of gravity approximating the geometric center, are aesthetically
successful. However, these images and pictures were not related in any way to
the "that's it" idea expressed by painters when a painting appears
to be successful. Giving a name to this
aesthetic phenomenon: Pictorial Coherence A picture in
a high state of coherency has a glow that results from being able to see the
entire painting immediately from a distance and a feeling of being able to
gaze at the whole painting while looking at individual parts. The eye is able
to roam freely all over it rather than being attached to isolated elements.
For this observer the eye can smoothly slide through path and lines in the
paintings. On examining a painting it might
be remarked that a space in the painting seems empty. This is often referred
to as the problem of the corners. The cubist were said to have tried to avoid
this problem by using oval canvases. If one were to make a painting with the
problem corner coherent, this problem
disappears. It is not as if the corner is given some special
attention, assuming it was left alone while the painting was transformed. It
is that coherency has the effect of freeing the eye to move so that it does
not get stuck looking at something of little interest such as that
troublesome corner. As will be discussed below, if the painting is moved to a
place where it loses coherency or becomes less coherent, the eye would get
stuck again. Coherency is a state and not a permanent attribute of a picture
for it depends not only on the picture but the lighting and spatial
conditions in which it is viewed. As with any
sensory perception this visual attribute of a picture has to be learned. In
the example given above, the viewer would have to learn to notice that the
corners seem empty. Without that the change would not be noticeable. Like any sensory perception there are
people who are particularly sensitive to it or have been taught to see it
while others cannot perceive it. Not everyone is capable of analyzing a
perfume or a wine and for many a
response of oly like or dislike might be elicited
even after attempting to experience a quality that they are told is there.
All of this does not mean in any way that the traditional cognitive aspects
of looking do not exert a powerful force over how a picture is viewed. The
two ways of viewing operate simultaneously with coherency facilitating the
careful inspection of the picture. A number of
coherent pictures along with less coherent or incoherent variations are
illustrated for reference. These images should be seen using the original
computer files on a monitor that is color calibrated in a place with limited
reflections. A printed image is very unlikely to be at all faithful to the
original. figure 1 Miro Coherent figure 2 Miro Not Coherent
Figure 3 NOT COHERENT Figure 4 Coherent Braque The Castle Roche-Guyon
fig 5
Cézanne Coherent fig
6 Cézanne Not coherent figure 7 Coherent Velasquez 'Juan de Pareja'
Physical Attributes of a Picture capable of being seen
in a State of Fine Coherence Given the example of a painting in a
highly coherent state, the conditions for creating it can be determined. Deviations from these conditions, by for
example painting over parts of the painting, lead to a greater or lesser loss
of coherency. Empirically coherency is
determined by the average tone or luminance of each quadrant of a picture
such that the two upper quadrants should
be equal to each other, and the two lower quadrants should be also
equal to each other. The balance of the upper half with respect to the lower
half depends on how the picture is viewed. For an average size picture on the
wall (or any vertical position) at approximately eye height the upper half
must have an average luminance somewhat less than the lower half (be darker).
For a picture lying flat before the viewer, the luminance of the upper half
should be equal to or somewhat lighter
than the lower half. Very large
pictures and even average size pictures have different requirements depending
on how high they are hung as discussed below. Table A one gives the tonal and
center of gravity attributes of figures 1 to 6. Initially
on studying this problem of pictorial composition or the effect called
coherence, the author was of the impression (as considered in the different
studies by Locher and others) that a center of
gravity type of balance was necessary to obtain this state. Prior to using MatLab to performs these calculations, Photoshop's
luminance averaging feature was used as an approximation to the center of
gravity balance to help modify computer images until they reached a visual
state of coherency. Subsequently it was realized that the luminance averaging
value of each quadrant was a good fit for a coherent state while the center
of gravity did not distinguish between a coherent and an incoherent
image. The center
of gravity model of pictorial balance in which the center is made to
correspond closely to the geometric center or a major axis is correct in so
far as the majority of paintings whether good or bad are centrally balanced.
It does not explain or create the conditions necessary to arrive at a state
of coherence (the "that's it") in an image. The observations of art
students creating images balanced around the center and all of Firstov's scanned images show that this is the way all
people including artists and initially this writer approach or conceptualize
balanced images. All of the
problems that painters observe with pictures changing from
"working" to "not working" relate to this balance of
luminance. For example, this writer has noted with chagrin that a perfectly
balanced painting lost its glow when a curator placed it very high on a wall.
The apparent constancy of size, shape and illumination is maintained with
height, but in reality these
attributes are changed due to the change in perspective. As a painting is raised higher on the
wall, the image of the top half being farther away becomes smaller on the
retina. A smaller image means less light is reflected or in other words it
becomes darker. As a result the balancing
point becomes lower assuming the illumination and reflectance is unchanged.
The change in luminance will not be consciously noted because the brain
infers that the picture as an object will have the same luminance as it moves
in a more or less constant light environment (luminance constancy). This
change will only be noticed for a painting moving from a state of fine coherency to a lesser
or worse state. As discussed above concerning the example of the painting
with the problem corner, changing the position and therefore changing the
luminance will not change the problem corner. There are many different
possible types and an infinite number of degrees of deviation from
perfection. The subject of how much a painting can deviate from the optimum
state while retaining visual characteristics of coherency is quite
complicated and will not be discussed in this paper. . Viewing a
painting from an angle also causes problems for the same perspective reason:
the farther side becomes darker. This change also occurs when a painting is
flat before the viewer. Watercolors are often created on a table, and
photographs are frequently examined that way. A previously coherent image
when exhibited on a vertical wall will appear differently. A change
in lighting or viewing will have a powerful effect on how the picture is
perceived as any change in the reflectance of the surface of the painting or photograph will
change the tonal balance. This can also occur on a computer monitor that is
mirroring a light source behind it. LED panels also have marked changes of
color and contrast with viewing angle. The other effect of illumination is
due to the temperature or spectrum of the light. Since the coherent state is
created through tonal balance, any color can be interchanged with any other
as long as the balance is maintained. However, when a painting, created under
a warm incandescent light, is illuminated with a cooler white light, color in
the painting will have a profound effect. Incandescent light which is
relatively deficient in blue wavelengths will make colors that contain blue
darker because there is less blue light to be reflected. When seen under
bluer light, they will appear lighter.
Pictures
with a lot of little forms of more or less equal value where the forms cannot
be visually combined to create larger forms are incoherent. This might be
seen as somewhat similar to the
findings of Locher, 1993 that mirror symmetry is
most salient in compositions where small objects were formed into larger
groups. An example of this phenomena is Kandinsky's "Sky Blue" 1940
figure 8 (10) figure 8 158,159,161,160 The average luminance is equal for the top and bottom half.
Darkening the upper part somewhat (figure 9) does not change the state of
incoherency even though it meets the criteria of bilateral symmetry with the
top half somewhat darker. The eye just moves from form to form without being
free to see the entire painting.
figure 9 151,153,163,163 When the picture is organized so that the different forms
are not so evenly distributed, it becomes more coherent and the eye can slide
through the painting. (figure 10) figure 10 153, 153,161,160 Proposed Neuropsychological
explanation of findings: Coherent pictures stimulate in a special selective manner
the magnocellular visual pathway A visually coherent image has several
properties. It can be seen at a glance from a distance. Color has no effect
on determining coherence other than its effect on luminance. Fine detail and
forms are disregarded. The gaze seems to take in the whole picture, and the
eye can move around easily. Binocular vision is required for the property of
coherence to exist. The viewer cannot experience it when using only one eye. Almost all visual information is sent to
various vision centers through two different streams: the parvocellular
pathway and the magnocellar pathway. The type of
visual information processing described above with a coherent picture
corresponds to the rapid responses of the magnocellular
stream. This pathway is very sensitive to luminance change and not to color.
It has low spatial frequency so that forms cannot be delineated precisely,
and it is highly sensitivity to motion. All retinal cells send information
through both pathways. However, outside the fovea, the density of cone
photoreceptors is less but they are more interconnected. They convey local or
relative contrast information rather than precise light level
information. Peripheral vision is
largely processed through the magnocellular
pathway. The information in the parvocellular
stream is required for high level object resolution, precise location,
texture and color. (11) Normally with pictures in a state of more or
less incoherence; the eye focuses on the different images in the
picture. When a picture achieves a
state of coherence, it would seem that the magnocellular
pathway is stimulated in a particular way such that some people who are
particularly sensitive to this effect are able to overriding the need
for precise fixation of the images
within the painting. They are able to slide the eye around the painting in a
smooth continuous movement and scan rapidly the entire image. While the preceding observations
postulate a general activation of the magnocellular
pathway, there may be an additional more specific visual effect of a coherent picture. A bilateral tonally
balanced circumscribed form with the upper half somewhat darker may be interpreted as a schematic face. It would
be highly desirable to be able to scan a scene and have the attention
directed to focus on an embedded face. The gaze using predominantly peripheral vision
would be most important for this. Although peripheral vision is fast but
blurred it has been shown to have a higher than expected ability for scene
gist recognition. (11A) It has been shown that
the fast magnocellular stream directly connects to
facial recognition centers including centers evaluating the emotional content
of facial expressions. The high level evaluation is returned downstream to
direct further investigation by lower level vision centers. What this means is that if a painting were
seen on first approximation to be a face, it would induce the feeling that we
want to look at that particular picture rather than just move. (12) (13) Although slow pursuit eye movements
are considered to be impossible without the appearance of a moving object, it
is the experience of this writer that a coherent painting permits this type
of movement. Eye tracking studies are necessary to determine the nature of
eye movements on looking at a picture in a state of coherency as well as fMRI studies to determine what visual centers are
stimulated. The activation of the magnocellular
pathway is a neuropsychological effect explaining a particular aspect of
the aesthetic appreciation of pictures. SUMMARY Traditional painters have sought to achieve an
elusive compositional effect which has had no metaphoric description. The effect which is very rapidly felt in a
pleasurable way, involves seeing the entire picture at a glance and induces
the viewer to gaze at the whole image
while the eye moves freely over the entire painting. A painting having this
effect is said to be in a state of visual coherence. This effect is achieved
through tonal balancing of the upper right and left quadrants and the lower
right and left quadrants and with the upper half somewhat tonally darker than
the lower half when seen at eye level. This state is totally dependent on the balance of luminance, and any change
either in the position of the painting with respect to the viewer or the
quality of illumination will cause a diminishment or elimination of these visual
properties. Binocular vision is necessary to experience it. The effect is
consistent with a particular stimulation of the magnocellular
visual pathway as well as the interpretation of the image as a possible face.
REFERENCES 1 Puttfarken 1985 p. 40 2 ibid p. 134 3 ibid p. 121 4 Poore 1903 chapter 3, p.12 5 Arnheim 1974 p. 20 6 Locher et al 1998 7 Locher et al 2001 8 Locher, 2003 9 Firstov et al 2007 10 Locher, Wagemans 1993 11
Purves 2001 p.275 11A Larson A M, Loschky LC 12
Kveraga 2007 p.13232 13
Tobimatsu 2012
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K, Boshyan J, Bar M 2007 Magnocellular Projections as the
Trigger of Top-Down Facilitation in Recognition The Journal of Neuroscience, 27(48):13232–13240 Larson A M, Loschky
LC The contributions of central versus peripheral vision to scene gist
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