SEEING: an erotic philosophy of visual perception, Part 2, Loved states of light 1. Sea phosphoresceence - two passages from Darwin - Darwin on the Beagle 1832 describing the effect of one-celled Noctiluca miliaris, a bioluminescent form: The night was pitch dark, with a fresh breeze. The sea from its extreme luminousness presented a wonderful and most beautiful appearance; every part of the water which by day is seen as foam glowed with a pale light. The vessel drove before her bows two billows of phosphorus, and in her wake was a milky train. As far as the eye reached the crest of every wave was bright; and from the reflected light, the sky just above the horizon was not so utterly dark as the rest of the Heavens. this plain of matter, as it were melted and consumed by heat From The voyage of the Beagle, ch 8: On two occasions I have observed the sea luminous at considerabl depths beneath the surface. Near the mouth of the Plata some circular and oval patches, from two to four yards in diameter, and with defined outlines, shone with a steady but pale light; while the surrounding water only gave out a few sparks. The appearance resembled the reflection of the moon, or some luminous body; for the edges were sinuous from the undulations of the surface. The ship, which drew thirteen feet water, passed over, without disturbing these patches. Charles Darwin 1809-1882, English naturalist whose 5-year journey on the HMS Beagle when he was a young man gave him observations he used to establish the evolutionary theory of natural selection.
2. "I am the man of clouds": John Constable 1776-1837. Grew up in a country village, where his father was a corn merchant and mill owner; lived most of his life in London. "I should paint my own places best, painting is with me but another word for feeling" he wrote in 1821, in a letter to his friend. I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this summer, nor to give up my time to commonplace people. I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall endeavor to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing scenes that may employ me. There is room enough for a natural painting. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth. He said his profession as a painter could be shown to be "scientific as well as poetic." "We see nothing truly until we understand it." Spent two summers on Hampstead Heath learning to understand clouds. "I have made about fifty careful studies of skies." There is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London a room with some of his small oil sketches on paper. Notations on the back tell time of day, weather, direction of wind. Study of clouds Sept 5 1822. "Looking SE noon. Wind very brisk, & effect bright & fresh. Clouds moving very fast with occasional very bright openings to the blue." Called his wife "Fish". [Study of the stem of an elm tree XXVI] 6 cloud studies by Constable: [clouds 1] [clouds 2] [clouds 3] [clouds 4] [clouds 5] [clouds 6]
3. "Love eyes": Laura Sewall Adoration is a chemical aerial into the brain. Like a full tree rather than a skimpy tree. I was coming to see that we are embedded in light and beauty. - I remember the long grasses best. They filled every glance with wide expanses of color, color that shifted from every shade of green to deep mauve as the rainy season passed into dryness. I was in love with the long-stemmed grasses. In the early morning they glistened and softened my eyes. In the late afternoon they gathered and reflected low warm light, softening my body. ... they were the ground of my entire world, filling each day with brilliant shades of chartreuse and deep green, then shifting with the season to peach tones, to salmon and pink; then to many shades of rose, burgundy, mauve, purple, and plum; then to yellow and shiny golden tones. All day long, every day, they gathered up my attention, swaying and teasing me, tugging me into a widening gyre of color, and of the world ... I remember shifting my gaze to the grasses and noticing the color changes from the day before - and then it came. I could say I was consumed, washed over by waves of rightness, is-ness and nothing more, but these words fall short of my experience. I had no doubt, no question, no thought until after the fact. I simply felt yes, entirely this, totally as it should be, without words or the thoughts to think them, bliss, rapture, unity, sudden, swift, easy, like sway ... . In the aftermath, I knew that light had streamed through my eyes, that I had been gathering light for many months, and that beauty had become deeply embedded in my brain, sinking into my body and resurfacing as bliss .... My eyes continually stretched to and rested on the distant blue horizon, continually scanning, looking and watching, as if busy in the act of gathering beauty - although it seemed to seep through every pore and sometimes simply slice through me. I had surrendered myself. - From 1999 Sight and sensibility: the ecopsychology of perception - Perhaps because of my relationship with my grandfather, I know a love that is filled with play, and my father's phrase "He could not take his eyes off you" comes back to me as I think about times I have loved with my eyes wide open, when there was no bar to seeing and being seen. - Carol Gilligan The Birth of Pleasure Laura Sewall studied visual psychology and neuroscience at Brown, until recently taught ecopsychology at Prescott College in Arizona, is now the director of a research and conservation area on the coast of Maine and works on the relation of visual attention and neural structure. Carol Gilligan b.1936 is an American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist best known for two books about loss and recovery of voice in women, In a different voice (1982) and The birth of pleasure (2002).
4. "I found the image in the light on paper": Joyce Wieland [Artist on fire 1983] Canadian artist 1931-1998, lived in New York and Toronto, worked in a number of media. 1971, first major show by a living female artist at the National Gallery of Canada. Long married to a more famous Canadian filmmaker; after her divorce her work took a turn toward less abstract, more personal and mythological forms. I noticed certain kinds of radiance around the edges of objects and I began to see the primary colors I found the image in the light on the paper I loved what was emerging, but they were sometimes just a single figure, in a room or in a landscape. and very often the figure would be pointing, pointing to the next drawing, in a way. So they led me along, and they gradually got more complex. They were the only things I've done in my life that actually happened to me. They are about a kind of contact I've made inside myself, which seemed to be connected with something outside. It seemed to be a kind of union with certain things. It's as though I've brought together all the things I really like, in the form of drawing. - the then director of the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art said they were "the most beautiful drawings ever done in this country."
5. Light and color in the open air: Marcel Minnaert 1893-1970 Belgian naturalist (actually an astronomer with a PhD in biology) whose classic description and explanation of atmospheric effects was published in 1954. While held in prison camps during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II Minnaert taught physics and astronomy to other prisoners. Examples: The rare moments when sun and full moon face each other across the whole expanse of the world - east o' the sun and west o' the moon wd be dawn rather than sunset Cold air near the ground overlain with warmer at the border leads to supersaturation, small ice columns and needles, diamond dust will be formed and float down glittering from a cloudless sky. A virga -
6. Day's light as such, 29 states of colored light: Imagining light, noticing light. The colors of daylight through the day and through the seasons. Moonlight, starlight, early spring midday, late summer nightfall. Sky light changing as the earth changes under it. The new moon in the old moon's arms when the land below the moon is covered with snow. Photos from the three years in my early thirties when I went back to the country where I grew up and lived alone in a couple of farmhouses in deep country.
7. Loutron, or The bath - Barbara Meter : A day in an old Ottoman bathhouse in Greece. Loutron made in 2009, video, 17 min. Meter is director/producer/editor with sound and camera help. Born 1939, lives in Amsterdam. BA in Dutch literature; graduated in 1963 from the Dutch film academy, first short film in 1967. Active in film co-op movement from the 60s onward. Has programmed and taught film; has made a lot of experimental films, plus some feature films and documentaries. Has spent a lot of time in Greece.
8. Orientation: space and time ordered by light an ordered multitude of local directions Medecine wheels and other ancient structures. The Dunne-za of northwestern Canada sleep with their heads in the direction of the rising sun because dreams are thought to come down to them along the path of the sun. Local time is measured from the sun's transit over the meridian of place. Coordinated Universal Time (abbreviated UTC), maintained by a large number of very precise "atomic clocks" at laboratories around the world, is 'universal' in the sense that it is based on the rotation of the earth compared to distant celestial objects, rather than our sun. Architecture that loves light. Chris Alexander saying any room should have windows on at least two sides. Christopher Alexander (1936- ) American architect, author of A timeless way of building (1979), A pattern language (1977), and the wonderfully voluminous 4-volume The nature of order: an essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe (2003-4)
9. More structure with which to love This lovely light, it lights not me. - Captain Ahab in Moby Dick The guy on CBC last night talking about what's meant by rich color. If a green is made by mixing blue and yellow pigments rather than with plain green pigments, more of the light in a room will be reflected, the atmosphere of the room will have more wavelengths active. There will be more reactive surface for the reflection of other colors in the room. - Do I want to speak and show what I know and see? Or do I pretend to be an object of desire and only give what I've told myself they only want to see? The answer is obvious, but it's taken me years to arrive at it. I spent the whole of last semester taking off masks. Now all I want to do is claim what I know and see. (Student) - "What was different was not the drawing but the seeing. I caressed what I drew with my eyes, lingering over every curve and bump, gliding around contours and into shadows. No matter what I looked at in this way, I saw beauty and felt love...And then I discovered that it didn't matter what the drawing was like. In fact, I could simply toss it away, like the skin of a banana. What mattered was the slow, careful gaze." - Danny Gregory in Everyday Matters
10. A painting exercise: Jack Wise The first exercise is with the mind - allowing the possibility of finding a small rock without conscious seeking, aimless wandering, purposeless - with faith - the rock finds the searcher - a foundation stone. A careful color study is made - the subtle nuances of hue, value, density - color mixed to match, the rock is meditated upon intensely - definition must dissolve in the merging of the subject-object - 'rockness' must be experienced beyond definition - beyond size - beyond verbal grasp. The rock must be entered, wandered in - again without purpose - one must scale cliffs, abide in grottos, slide down crystalline facets of direct perception - one must pierce the rock until it becomes everything. A gentle withdrawal. The rock is just a rock. With a small brush one mixes a slightly darker value than the shadows, a slightly higher one for the relief - then commences painting on the stone its own colors - carving with the dark pathways already existent - tracing ravines, joining crevasses, dissecting with surgical precision the topology - never imposing - always teasing out inherent structure - emphasizing the already existing! - Jack Wise Painting from nature analysis, 1977 American/Canadian painter 1928-1996. Good film about his work: Language of the brush (1998) dir. David Rimmer.
|