Visual Taste - How to Use Your Eyes

Author: James Elkins (USA)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: Let us open this book with the heart of opening a gift. Grass, night sky, stamps, the cracks on the road, shoulders—ordinary things in everyday life. When we truly look—really look at them—what can we see? In this book, Professor James Elkins invites us to watch—perhaps to see the surrounding world for the first time—and to make breathtaking discoveries. This book pushes the lens into the everyday things (including artifacts) that people often overlook or misinterpret, telling you that you can identify a butterfly by its wings, that a cloudless sky will gradually change colors at sunset with precise layers, that a bridge can reveal the relationship between people and that place, and that the cracks in an oil painting can reveal its age, while the cracks in the road also hold some secrets. With the keen eyes of an artist and the passion of a detective, Elkins also examines complex things, such as Buddhist and Hindu mandalas, the periodic table of chemical elements, hieroglyphs, etc., turning the world into a treasure trove for an observer.
The last example (Figures 3–6) is an 18th-century French painting, also painted on canvas. Bakker describes its characteristics:
· The cracks have no significant direction.
· They form large, independent color blocks.
· The cracks are not jagged.
· They are curved.
· They do not form independent square color blocks.
French paintings of this period used thicker grounds, which effectively "reduced the mutual influence between the paint layer and the underlying layer"—that is, the cracks could maintain a certain distance from the tension that caused them (Figure 3–2 is also a French painting). If the ground is solid, new cracks do not form frequently; instead, existing cracks become longer. The shape of the cracks in this case indicates the "ubiquitous" tension across the entire canvas, rather than the localized force on the canvas weave, as seen in Figure 3–5. Bakker's work is complex, but you can apply these simple criteria by spending an afternoon in a museum trying not to look at the paintings themselves. If you simply gaze at the surface of the painting, you can learn a lot and see a lot, which is quite interesting. The four traditions I summarize are well-exhibited in museums and are quite consistent. If you examine more unfamiliar painting styles, you will discover many other crack shapes that do not conform to some of these standards here. Occasionally, the shape of the cracks can be more beautiful than the painting itself. Several years ago, I had such a visual experience with an abstract painting by Piet Mondrian: the painting itself consisted of nothing more than black and red lines, but the cracks in it had a charming and perfect spiral shape.
Going to a museum just to look at the cracks in the paintings might seem unconventional. However, paintings are very complex objects, and there is much to see. Even in my field of art history, people find it overwhelming to look at, so we often overlook the most obvious things: the frame, the dust, the varnish, and the cracks that are almost present on every painting.