My friend was at a Cleveland Browns game and a wife turned to her husband and said, “Did you see that??”
“I seen it!” the husband said. “I seen it WITH MY OWN EYES!”
That’s how I felt last night when I caught my first glimpse of Saturn’s rings through my birthday present. So good.
After I wrote about looking at things upside down, a reader relayed what his daughter was learning in army cadet training: “In the field, troops are told to scan from right to left. As we generally read left to right, doing the opposite aids in detecting anomalies in the landscape and potential threats to safety.”
Here’s photographer Dale Wilson (emphasis mine):
One of the first tricks I learned many years ago had nothing to do with photography, but was drilled into me by an army sergeant. It only took a few smacks up the back of my head to learn how to look from right-to-left when scanning a landscape in an effort to see the hidden “enemy” in our mock battles. This process of reverse reading forced me to slow down and read each tree as if it were a syllable I was seeing for the first time. Even today, about thirty years after I called that sergeant every adjective not found in a descent dictionary, I still find myself scanning a landscape from right-to-left.
More on reading right-to-left here.
“Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e., we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.”
—Henry David Thoreau, journal, July 2, 1857
A reader wrote in to tell me my pictures of the moon through my new telescope were beautiful and all, but the moon was upside down. Indeed! When you look through a Dobsonian telescope the image you see is upside down because the mirror in the bottom is curved, as is explained in this video, with a kitchen spoon, some sticks, and a piece of foam:
I didn’t bother altering the image of the moon in the post, because I wanted to show it as it looked through my viewfinder.
I’m reminded of Betty Edwards’ book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which includes an exercise that asks the drawer to draw something upside down:
Familiar things do not look the same upside down. We automatically assign a top, bottom, and sides to the things we perceive, and we expect to see things oriented in the usual way – that is, the right side up. For, in upright orientation, we can recognize familiar things, name them, and categorize them by matching what we see with our stored memories and concepts.
When an image is upside down, the visual cues don’t match. The message is strange, and the brain becomes confused.
What you do, when you turn something upside down, is make it strange — when your brain doesn’t know exactly what it is that you’re looking at, you start to really look at the thing and see it with “fresh” eyes.
This, by the way, is exactly what a camera obscura does. Here’s photographer Abelardo Morell demonstrating his technique:
(A fabulous read on art and optics is David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge.)
As Paul Valéry put it (paraphrased for the title of Weschler’s book on artist Robert Irwin): “To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.”
Ever since he’s been old enough to walk, one of my favorite things has been to let my oldest son lead me around an art museum. Yesterday we hit the new chapel designed by Ellsworth Kelly, but my favorite part was browsing the exhibit of Kelly’s work at the Blanton.
O was most drawn to the piece above, Spectrum ColorsArranged By Chance V, which delighted me, as it’s my favorite series of Kelly’s work, and it has a special connection to kids: It was made in 1951 after Kelly was browsing a stationery shop in Paris and came across a special kind of gummy paper made for French schoolchildren. Kelly cut the paper into squares, made a 38×38 grid, assigned each color a number, and pulled numbers out of a hat to get the composition.
Kelly said of his work:
“I don’t invent… It’s not about my signature. It’s something about perception. My eye picks up things in nature; I’m interested in the whole thread of what you look at… I always feel I have to do something new. It has to hit me as something I haven’t seen before, and that gets harder as I get older. But I’m not searching for something. I just find it. The idea has to come to me. I find myself in nature–the roof of a building or a shadow, something that has the magic of life, fragments I can take out and build on…. I have trained my eye to play with images…. My eye is like a dictator for me. I don’t understand it, but it rules me. And it always surprises me. I might do a lot of curves, put them out and look at them. My eye tells me the one to use.”
O loves to read the museum labels next to the pieces, so we were soon discussing the words “spectrum,” “arranged,” and “chance,” and then roman numerals, as he’s newly interested with math and numbers. I love talking to him about stuff like this, as I either quickly realize how little I actually know about the subjects, or I articulate something I’ve never articulated before.
Here is writer Rumaan Alam saying the same about looking at art with his kids:
Talking to my kids about what we’re looking at helps clarify my thinking, much as reading aloud something you’re writing can sharpen a sentence. I have to articulate, in terms a kid can comprehend, what I see or feel or think about a piece of art. I find I don’t rush to my own judgment, even if I think I’ve already made that judgment. Looking at Carmen Herrera’s precise minimalist paintings last winter at the Whitney, I stumbled over explaining to my kids why I like them—their precision, the beautiful purity of her colors—and realized that was something I’d never fully explained to myself.
After looking at the Kelly pieces, O and I decided we could make our own versions when we got home. (We’re headed to the craft store later today to look for the right paper.)
Then as if on cue, history repeated itself…
…and the two boys re-staged this scene from about a year ago:
Again I say, if you want to enjoy art, borrow a kid.
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