An Artist's Perspective on Visual Literacy

We find ourselves at the beginning of this new millenium awash in images, in fact the most visually rich culture ever to have existed, and yet ours is largely a visually illiterate society.

We are bombarded to the point of being inured with images but, ironically, a vast number of people are increasingly unable to perceive the importance of the physicality of images, and the nuances of the mediums that produce them, which in part gives them meaning. People that are looking at and are being seduced by ads, for instance, receiving these images in a flat manner, the manner of video, the computer screen, billboards, magazines, etc. The lowest common denominator of this flatness is photography, and its ubiquity is replacing the importance of physicality. The materiality of ads is subsurvient to the messages they’re meant to convey, and doesn’t reside in their substance (“Image is Everything”, as the Canon Camera Company unapologetically reminds us). Their strength is expediency.


the photo from which I made the drawing, below


Palatine Shade, 2004, 42" x 38", charcoal on paper

I am a painter, drawer and printmaker of unpeopled landscapes. I came to think about visual literacy while noticing that, during studio visits to see my work, collectors would often (often!) look at large charcoal drawings, which to me look like nothing else in the world, and innocently ask, “Is this a photograph?” Their intentions were good, but aggrieves me that people would not see the difference between something that had been made by hand and something that had been made by a machine.

No matter how manipulated a photograph is in the darkroom or on the computer, it does not have the same weight and feeling of a drawing or painting, nor should it. Art photography has its own materiality, and in fact suffers from the same overload of photographic images as other art mediums. I am not simply alarmed by a failing of perception of the medium, like some technical IQ test. I’m alarmed because I know that the physicality of an object is an important part of its affect. When I’m looking at a four-storey ad on the side of a building, chances are that I’m not looking at scale within my own body context; I’m looking at something that’s simply huge, merely eye-catching, the equivalent of trying to give the spoken word weight by yelling. In art, it’s not size, it’s scale that counts.

When I lecture on my work, I often mention a book called “The Poetics of Space” by Gaston Bachelard. It’s a book that tries to explain how poetry works, and it does it in the smartest and perhaps only possible way: by being poetic itself. Bachelard has a whole chapter devoted to what he calls “intimacy in immensity”, by which he’s referring to the way we can make even an immense space be able to be absorbed by our imaginations, and in the case of a poem or a painting, induce a person to have the experience of vastness that feels in proportion to his or her inner expansiveness. It’s a tricky thing to achieve, and it’s what makes a lot of great art great.


Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm #30, 1950, 105" x 207", oil on canvas

When I look at Pollock’s “Autumn Rhythm”, the sense of it being a size that extends to but does not leave my peripheral vision, that allows me to move around in it without being overwhelmed, that follows the artist’s own body movement, is part of its effectiveness. In a similar but entirely reverse way, when I look at Ven Eyck’s Last Judgment,


Jan Van Eyck, Crucifixion and Last Judgment, 1425-30, each panel 22" x 7.25", oil on panel

the ability of the mind and eye to self-miniaturize, and so enter into and participate in the painting in its complex and reduced scale, is part of its wonder. However different, these two paintings are both scale-specific, and have the effect of making us conscious of our bodies. That this is an integral part of our visual & mental reaction to a work of art is a critical part of the wonder of art. A gigantic underwear ad simply uses the lowest common denominator of scale, size.


Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, 1664, 16" x 14", oil on canvas

Vermeer’s portraits are wonders not only because of their incredible light and sense of intimacy, but because the paintings themselves are approximately upper-body in scale, and we “fit” into them as witnesses: to the letter-reading, weighing, and other private activites they record.


Johannes Vermeer, The View of Delft, 1660-61, oil on canvas

The “View of Delft”, on the other hand, is a much larger painting for Vermeer; it starts to leave that sense of upper body which focuses on the head and instead becomes directed outward, to our periphery, into space. The sense of proscenium in this painting is profound. The clouds at the top and the gently curving shore open to the middle of the painting, like an eye opening, into the exterior world the painting shows, and ight in the distance draws us towards infinity and a sense of the immensity of space, but which Vermeer presents with great intimacy.

I don’t want to suggest that in the making of art the artist consciously schemes to produce these effects, but in the same way that a painting holds within itself the history, time, and the tale of its formation, a person looking at it is informed, enriched, and is subliminally able to experience all of that input. The object’s physicality speaks to us, and our response is an affirmation of our own physicality, forming a connection and an interface of time and space, intent and emotion, even history. A painting’s actual physical presence allows us to react in terms of the scale of our own humanity, both personally and as a culture. Its spiritual and psychological impact works because of the way it is made, both in terms of subject matter, medium and scale. When we see a representation, like a reproduction, that does not use the weight and fact of its physicality to empower it, it remains instead only an image of the actual, empowered object.

When we are watching television, we see the world miniaturized before us, which is the nature of the medium, and an impressive nature it has. But the difference between it and art is that it we don’t separate ourselves from its nature. Television is a kind of talking head that never becomes the “other” in the way that art does, a separate physical entity meant to both challenge and involve ourselves in our distance from it.

Now this is not something for which I fault television or computers pe se. We are taught literature, and the fundamentals for understanding writing, themes, and styles therein, and the difference between great literature and ad copy. But this disctinction is not stressed in the teaching of visual art in this most visual of all cultures. In the case of schooling in the America, where teaching art, the history of art, and the experience of art is endangered except in specialized schools and on occasional outings, there is sadly little encouragement for the students to develop a sensitivity to the basic language of art, importantly involving material and scale. A painting in the flesh is, and should be, a somatic experience for the viewer. An image painted by hand, rather than reproduced in a magazine, has the feel of its painted surface, and the manner in which that paint is applied, be it realistic or abstract.


Johannes Vermeer, Girl With a Pearl Earring, 1665, 18" x 15", oil on canvas

To return to Vermeer for a moment, even though to the modern viewer the realism of the painting may appear “photographic”, our culture’s litmus test for realism, the materiality of the paint itself, however smoothly applied, can represent a weight and meaning a photograph cannot contain. This is activated and in part dictated by the painting’s dimensions. For an object to be 6 ft. wide


Giotto, The Annunciation to St. Anne, 1304-06, fresco, 78" x 72"
and be roughly the size of a person,

Monet's Waterlilies at the MoMA, 1920, oil on canvas, 78" x 501"
or even the size of many persons,


Paul Cezanne, Apples and Pears, 1878-80, 38" x 46", oil on canvas
rather than the size of an average window,


Hans Holbein the Younger, Member of the Wedigh Family, 1536, 16.5" x 12.75", oil on panel
or to be the size of a human face – these are things that are part of the decision-making process of the artist and part of the gestalt of the work of art. Whether the effect is that of the viewer feeling miniaturized by the work of art, wherein the viewer “enters” the work of art by imaginatively becoming its size,


Albrecht Altdorfer, Landscape With Satyr Family, 1507, 9" x 7.75", oil on panel

or whether the work of art feels as big as a room that one can enter, to be experienced as one’s full physical self,

Gericault, Raft of the Medusa, 1819, 193" x 281", oil on canvas

are two of the amazing things that art can “make” someone experience. To know the difference between those things and to experience that difference is all the difference in the world, and it is nothing like the way most visual information is paraded before us and perceived.

This poverty of discernment is high irony in terms of the technological advancedness for which our culture is so fond of congratulating itself. I am not at all adverse to technology in general. I am thrilled about the dissemination of art to a greater audience via the World Wide Web, and I use a computer sketching and collaging. I find it to be an invaluable preparatory tool.


photograph used to make the painting below


The Fall, 2001, 74" x 93", oil on linen

When I go to a museum, however, I find that the physicality of the works of art I see is actually enhanced by my recent experience of having been gazing at a flat computer screen; there’s a heightened pleasure for me in seeing a “real” handmade object, with that wealth of embedded information. But I know that many other people are seeing those same objects simply as images, and are expecting only to be given a quick visual fix, to be attracted or repelled and move on. It’s critical that children be taught to understand that physicality makes a world of difference in perceiving art, the difference between art and advertising, and between art and the reproduction of it in a book. It’s critical to their understanding of their own physicality, and their own poetic/perceptual potential. The disembodied image is of course useful as information. But visual arts are and always have been a certain kind of virtual reality. The real power of the visual arts in their capacity as virtual reality is the physicality of the experience, the somatic connection that remains between the work of art, the artist who made it, and the person looking at it. That connection is an essential part of the human experience, a verification of humanity, history, and our connectedness itself.