Arnheim’s discussion of how children and early art use outlines, local brightness, and local color reminded me of the difficulties I experienced when I learned how to shade drawings. For years and years, despite the many lessons I was given in shading, I refused to apply them to my own work. Rather than adding depth to the images, I felt that shading a face simply made it look dirty. Dramatic changes in brightness values, like clothing or hair or eyes would be a different color, but anything that is theoretically the same shade all over, such as skin, was left blank. In hindsight, I wonder why I thought these uniform figures were more realistic than the “dirty” shaded ones. I don’t think it was a matter of my shading being wrong. I didn’t learn any new techniques or have any major breakthroughs before I began to apply it to my work. I honestly think it must have been a difference in perception. What that difference is, I can’t begin to say, but the way I saw the world changed once I began to think of images in terms of shadows and light.
On a related note, the idea that light creates depth is not new to me, but it is one that I have always found fascinating. That, given the right lighting, a three dimensional object like the cone that Arnheim discusses (311) can appear to be two dimensional is hard to imagine. Logically, it seems like all three dimensional objects should remain that way and should be easy to perceive in their true form. Yet, in light of how much time and energy is spent on making two dimensional objects look like they exist in space, it should not be so surprising that the reverse is possible. It just emphasizes how easy it is to trick our brains into believing one thing about an image when the reverse is actually true.
Finally, I loved Arnheim’s discussion of cast shadows, particularly his description of the tribesmen in western Africa who “avoid walking across an open space or clearing at noontime because they are afraid of ‘losing their shadow’” (317). The idea that a shadow is an extension of the person it belongs to has always been interesting to me (and just might have stemmed from my childhood love of Peter Pan…), so the idea that the process of a shadow shrinking as the sun gets further and further overhead is actually a manifestation of it getting weaker is intriguing. In fact, now that I think of it, the tendency to see a shadow as separate from the object it belongs to just might explain the absence of shading in early art. If a person believes that cast shadows are separate from objects and people, the idea that other shadows are an integral part of the person or object itself would be hard to grasp.
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Emma, I'm also interested in this separation of shadow and object. Your hypothesis drawn to the absence of shading in early art is fascinating! There are also few shadows in (not early) Chinese and Japanese art. In reading for my conference work, I read an anecdote from David Hockney, where he asked a respected Chinese art historian why there were no shadows, and she simply said, "Because they're not important".
ReplyDeleteIt's odd to think of that way, but in some circumstances true. Here, then, we go further than the separation between object and shadow and into the separation between "important" things and then.. I don't know, atmospheric "extras" like shadows? Though, at times, shadows are extremely important in giving us information about our surroundings. Perhaps, then, she just means that the shadows aren't conceptually "important"? I don't really know how to wrap my head around her statement but it fascinates me.