THE ART OF SEEING

 

THE ART OF SEEING

I once read that when Catherine the Great amassed an impressive art collection by buying up private collections of the Western European nobility, her primary motivation was personal, not national. She was driven by her desire to understand just what it was that made the art “great”. She would spend hour after hour roaming the art-filled hallways, stopping from time to time in front a painting and stare at it, oblivious to all else. She was not above looting the national treasury in order to satisfy her own curiosity, but all of Russia, and the entire world, has benefited from the acquisitiveness that was eventually to culminate in the magnificent Hermitage Museum.

She was probably the most successful art collector in the world, because she had tremendous financial resources at her disposal; and she bought art collections at discount prices because the owners were desperate for funds to finance their military operations. Today, we can study the great works by visiting museums for nominal admission prices, and we can sit at home and take virtual tours of art collections via the internet.

But at the time that I was trying to develop an appreciation for art, I was not in a position to spend any length of time in museums, and the internet did not yet exist. What I could do is buy books filled with color reproductions of famous paintings. Also, there were books about art, which were mostly about art history, with descriptions of various schools of art, with brief biographies of painters, sculptors, and architects, along with a chronological narrative of the evolution of art through the contributions of the various artists and “schools”.

These books gave me a modicum of intellectual knowledge about fine art, but they did little to help me to see what a true connoisseur sees. Fortunately, a local artist with something of a reputation as a painter in acrylics was teaching evening classes, and I was able to receive a couple of semesters of instruction. He would usually begin each class with a brief lecture on the theory (composition, perspective, etc.), or the philosophy, or the appreciation of painting, and then proceed to explain and demonstrate specific techniques. He tried to bring us to the point that we could look on people and nature the way that an artist sees them. But what helped me most in that regard was the gallery talks that he occasionally gave at local art displays and competitions. The artists were for the most part amateurs or semi-professionals, but he would call attention to certain works that were each noteworthy for some reason that had escaped me entirely, so that I began to realize how much I had been missing with my own superficial examinations of art creations. One result of those gallery talks was that I bought more books of art reproductions, but only those that included discussions of each painting – discussions that revealed what the untrained eye was likely to miss.

There was a time when I approached the arts theoretically, but I quickly learned that a theoretical appreciation is a far cry from an aesthetic experience. (However, I understand and respect those who do derive great satisfaction from a purely theoretical study of the arts.) I learned a lesson from a group of art students that was featured in a TV documentary about an art competition. Each entry was displayed individually, along with its artist. Of the some twenty entries nearly all appeared to me as typical student efforts; but one caught my eye as a true work of art. I was disappointed when the camera moved on to the next entry. The next part of the documentary consisted of interviews with the artists. A couple of the students impressed with me with penetrating philosophical descriptions of their approach to their art. Finally the camera came to the young lady who had painted the work that I had admired. She stammered and floundered, as if she had never given a thought to her motivation. But the works of the two philosophers were among the most mundane in the competition.

There is that occasional work that elicits an experience that is purely aesthetic – a work that goes beyond technical virtuosity and theoretical competence, that seems to spring from the soul of the artist to strike a resonant chord in the soul of the observer.

I will mention a kind of experience, which is sometimes described as “seeing with the eye of the artist”. I'm not at all certain that this visual experience can be described in words, but I'm going to give it a shot, by providing an example. I imagine that I'm walking along a country road, observing the meadows, hills, wooded areas, a brook, a foot path through the meadow, crossing the brook with a couple of planks, and finally disappearing behind the trees. I enjoy and appreciate the beauty and serenity of the scene.

But the artist will stop and imagine a section of the scene as a work of art painted by nature. He notices the brick red of the clay brook bank playing against the green of the meadow grass, the deepening of the sky blue from horizon to zenith, the asymmetric arrangement of the clouds, that balances the asymmetry of the hills and trees to create a pleasing pictorial composition, the variety of structure of the different trees and tree groupings, and so on almost endlessly - and without conscious thought to this process, but automatically, through hours of seeing this way.

There is another way of observing a scene. It is not so much an artistic experience, like “seeing with the eye of the artist” with its technical elements, as it is a purely visual experience. It is related to the effect that is sometimes experienced just after sunset when the disappearing sun reflects brilliantly from a cloud hovering just over the horizon. The red hues appear enhanced, taking on a kind of glow, and a flower garden seems to be enchanted, as if it has magically become an idealized version of itself. (Technically, this is known as the Purkinje effect.)

There are other times when a scene will suddenly take on a kind of aura, not perhaps with the kind of color enhancement that occurs with the sunset effect, but with an kind of glow that draws attention to its colors and forms, and seems to say, “Don't miss this moment!” I first experienced this effect when my two daughters were still children. Near our home, there was a wooded area where a huge pile of sawdust had been left by a no longer existing sawmill. It offered a novel place for the girls to play on a quiet week end morning. They were walking ahead of me and I was watching my step, looking down at the path, which was illuminated in splotches of light and dark as the sunlight filtered through the leaves. Suddenly and unexpectedly, all of the tensions of problem-solving and dealing with family responsibilities gave way. My eyes relaxed, and the scene took on a brilliant illumination, unlike anything that I had previously experienced.

And there is still another way of observing a scene. It has been expressed, not in the words of an artist, but in those of the American poet James Dickey, who wrote, “For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding”. I'm not certain that I interpret his meaning precisely, but I believe that the experience is similar to, but not the same as, deja vu. Here, there is for some reason a kind of resonance between the scene and the observer that elicits a certain mood – that mood being a function of the nature of the scene itself. It may be an idyllic rural scene that evokes a feeling of serenity, or a group of children playing happily together: a scene that revives the essence of childhood in the observer's heart. I could list many examples. When this kind of beholding occurs, all of the other senses are subdued, so that the observer exists only as an observer, on a different plane, in tune with a little piece of this physical world, with love and appreciation.

And there is yet another aspect of “seeing” that I learned from Marcel Proust, another writer who, like James Dickey, wrote about the adventure of seeing in a new way. My favorite Proust quote (and I have paraphrased the translation) is: “The true act of discovery lies not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes”. The idea is similar to the concept of “seeing with the eye of an artist”, but Proust applied it in a more general way – not only seeing a scene literally with the eyes, but also seeing an object or a situation through the eyes of memory and through the eyes of insight.

We are all familiar with the expression, “Take time to stop and smell the roses”, with its admonition that we should spend some time experiencing the beauties that we habitually bypass because our minds are otherwise occupied. Proust did that; but he didn’t limit that philosophy to something as obviously beautiful as the aroma of roses. He dwelt on the loveliness of the sunlight through the stained glass windows of the cathedral, and the exquisite melody in a violin sonata; but he also commented on such mundane things as the movement of the shadow of a porch vine as the sun slowly rose, or the psychological significance of the decision to wear a certain clothing item or to make a certain remark.

Unfortunately during a large part of his short adult life he was confined to his bed because of a severe case of asthma. During those long periods when he was alone with his own thoughts, he could have become cynical, or wallowed in self pity, or simply wasted time with some kind of simple entertainment. But instead, he read and studied, and he “researched lost time”. That is, he would search through his memories to find something noteworthy – something that evoked a mood, or a similarity, or an inspiration – something that was, without that recollection, lost. It could be a simple gracious act of nobility, unheralded, and even unnoticed by others, but secretly observed by Proust. It could be a certain flower that carried a special symbolism for a pair of lovers. It could be a phrase from the works of another writer that had impressed him as having a kind of magic. It could be something from the bizarre, surrealistic side of life. (He referred several times to Xerxes's attempt to punish the Hellespont for a storm that ruined his first attempt to bridge the Hellespont. Xerxes ordered his boatmen to spank it 300 times with their oars.) Proust didn't just list these things. He often commented on them, offering a special, and sometimes profound, insight that they had evoked. And the result was a literary masterpiece.

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