The Act of Creation (52 page)

model
, but a
motif
for his creation -- in the sense in which the landscape painter looks
for a romantic or pastoral motif.
In the terminology of behaviourist psychology we would have to say
that looking at the model constitutes the 'stimulus', and putting a
dab of paint on the canvas the 'response' -- and that is all there is
to it. But the two activities take place on two different planes. The
stimulus comes from one environment -- the outer world: the response acts
on a different environment: a square surface. The two environments obey
two different sets of laws. An isolated brush-stroke does not represent
an isolated detail. There are no point-to-point correspondences between
the two planes of the motif and the medium; they are bisociated as wholes
in the artist's mind.
Visual Inferences
Once the artist has acquired sufficient technical skill to do with his
material more or less what he likes, the question what he likes, i.e. what
aspects of reality he considers relevant, becomes all-important. In
other words, of the two variables I mentioned -- the limitations of
the medium, and the prejudiced eye beholding the motif, the first can
be regarded, within a given school, as relatively stable, and we can
concentrate our attention on the second. There can be no unprejudiced
eye for the simple reason that vision is full of ambiguities, and
all perception, as we saw, is an inferential construction which
proceeds on various levels, and most of it unconsciously (cf.
pp. 38-44
). The
visual constancies
(
p. 43
) which enable us to perceive objects as stable
in shape, size, colour, etc., in spite of their unstable, ever-changing
appearances are a first step in the interpretation of our confusing,
ambiguous retinal images. They are automatic skills, partly innate,
mostly learned in early childhood. The process is reversed in some of
the so-called optical illusions where the unconscious code governing
preception draws the wrong inferences in an unusual situation. But even
these primitive mechanisms, which normally function below the level
of awareness, can suddenly become a problem in interpretation for the
painter. I have mentioned (
p. 43
) that owing to
the mechanism of brightness-constancy a black glove looks as black in
sunlight as in the shade -- until you look at it through a reduction
screen in the experimental laboratory or through the impressionist
painter's crooked index-finger. The various constancies are unconscious
inferences we draw to make sense of our sensations, to lend stability
to the unstable flux of appearances. They transform what the eye sees
so as to suit the requirements of reason, of what we know about the
external world. Between the retina and the higher centres of the cortex
the innocence of vision is irretrievably lost -- it has succumbed to
the suggestion of a whole series of hidden persuaders.

 

 

Perceptual projection
, which I have already mentioned
(
p. 295
), is one of them: the unconscious mechanism
which makes us project events, located in the brain, into a distance of
yards or miles (as opposed to the dazzling flashes which are 'correctly'
located on the retina).
Foreshortening
and
perspective
are
consciously added twists to unconscious projection -- like sensations in
a phantom-limb: the flat canvas is the amputation stump. (The analogy is
actually quite precise: pain, too, is located in the brain, but projected
to the locus of the injury; the phenomenon of the phantom-limb is a
secondary projection.)

 

 

Projective empathy
is another hidden persuader which I have
briefly mentioned before (
p. 296
). Vernon Lee
[3] regarded aesthetic experience as primarily derived from 'the
attribution of our own moods of dynamic experience, motor ideas, to
shapes. We attribute to lines not only balance, direction, velocity,
but also thrust, strain, feeling, intention, and character.' Jaensch
has been able to demonstrate in a fascinating series of experiments
that the eidetic image (
p. 346
) of a straight
horizontal line will expand considerably in length ifa pull is exerted on
the horizontally outstretched arms of the subject. [4] And vice versa,
the sensation of the scanning motions performed by the eye, and of other
subliminal muscle-impulses and stresses -- not to mention Berenson's
'tactile values', the 'feel' of texture -- all interfere with perception.

 

 

Again, the painter can consciously exploit these unconscious processes,
and give them an added twist. In Seurat's 'divisionist' theory, horizontal
and 'gently' ascending lines, as well as 'cool' colours convey a mood of
calm and content, 'swift' and 'animated' lines and 'warm' colours make
for gaiety, and so on. (The adjectives in quotes have become so current
that we tend to overlook their synesthetic origin). Juan Gris, though
certainly far removed from Seurat's neo-impressionism, talked in the same
vein of 'expansive' and 'contractile' forms, of the physiological effects
of various types of symmetry. [5] The theorizings of the 'abstracts'
are not at all new. Linear rhythm, chromatic harmonies, and their
combined effects have always played, consciously or unconsciously,
an important part. In non-figurative painting the motifs are, instead
of a landscape and a human body, say blue squares and green arrows. But
ultimately these too are derived from nature -- the blue and the green,
the square and the arrow. Let me invoke the authority of the greatest
and most eclectic painter of our time:

 

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something.
Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality. There's no danger
then anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible
mark. It is what started the artist off, exalted his ideas, and stirred
up his emotions. . . . When I paint a picture I am not concerned with
the fact that two people may be represented in it. Those two people once
existed for me but they exist no longer.  My vision of them gave me an
initial emotion, then little by little their presence became blurred;
they became for me a fiction, and then they disappeared altogether,
or rather they were transformed into all kinds of problems, so that
they became for me no longer two people but forms and colours -- forms
and colours which nevertheless resume an experience of two people,
and preserve the vibration of their life. [6]

 

I must add a word on a more primitive kind of attitude to colour. Some
reactions to the 'temperature-values' of colours seems to be common
to most people within the same culture circle; Rimbaud even tried
to co-ordinate each vowel with a different colour. But the emotive
associations of specific colours vary from person to person, and can
be very strong. Wollberg [7] had a schizoid patient who reacted to red
with intense anxiety, to blue with a feeling of elation; yet under deep
hypnosis, Wollberg reversed these reactions. Valentines quotes the case
of a patient born blind who, after a successful operation, felt intense
pleasure at his first sight of red, and was physically sick at the first
sight of yellow. Man not only 'thinks with his hands', he quite often
sees with his bowels.

 

 

The visual constancies and illusions, perceptual projection, empathy and
synesthesia form an ascending series of inferential processes. One step
higher in the series we come to the phenomenon of the 'face hidden in the
tree', the 'image in the cloud', the Rohrschach-blot: the projection of
meaning into the ambiguous motif. Once more we have here an unconscious
process which has been consciously exploited from antiquity to the
expressionists. Pliny recounted the anecdote of an artist who tried in
vain to paint the foam at a dog's mouth until, in exasperation, he threw
a spongeful of paint at his canvas -- and there was the foam. The story
reappears in Leonardo's
Treatise on Paintings
-- where he makes
'our Botticelli' say that if you just throw a sponge at a wall it will
'leave a blot where one sees a fine landscape'. There is an oft-quoted
passage in that classic treatise which bears being quoted once more:

 

You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of
uneven colour. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be
able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with
mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills and valleys in great
variety; and then again you will see there battles and strange figures
in violent action, expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of
things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper
forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells,
in whose stroke you may find every named word which you can imagine. [9]

 

This passage inspired the eighteenth-century English landscape painter
Alexander Cozens to publish a book [10] recommending the use of random
ink-blots 'from which ideas are presented to the mind', to serve as
landscape motifs. It seems that Rohrschach's method of psychological
testing by inviting subjects to interpret ambiguous blot-shapes was
derived from Cozens -- and thus from Leonardo, and thus from Pliny.
Similar methods were used by Chinese artists from the eleventh century
onwards. The bisociations of form and meaning are inexhaustible.

 

 

In these cases the motif (the cloud, the patterned wallpaper, or the
ink-blot) and also the meaning read into it, are both of a visual nature.
But the matrix which provides the meaning can also be governed by
non-visual conceptual codes -- for instance, a verbal suggestion such as
Hamlet uses on Polonius to make the cloud change from weasel to whale;
or by the various notions entertained by Egyptian, Greek, and Byzantine
artists on the function and purpose of the human body. In some forms of
insanity, and in the experimental psychoses induced by drugs, the patient
sees serpents, genitals, archaic creatures budding out of every curve
of an ornamental design. The cubist's vocabulary consists of cylinders
and cubes; the pointillist's of daubs; classical composition obeyed the
grammar of harmony and balance; the Egyptian painter saw in stereotyped
clichés; so does the Japanese Zen artist.

 

 

 

Codes of Perception

 

 

This leads us to the most powerful single factor among the many factors
which enter into the processing of the visual input: the power of
convention as a hidden persuader (
p. 42
f.).
Perception is a part-innate, part-acquired skill of transforming the
raw-material of vision into the 'finished product'; and every period
has its conventional formulae and methods of interpretation for doing
this. The ordinary mortal thinks most of the time in clichés -- and
sees most of the time in clichés. His visual schemata are prefabricated
for him; he looks at the word through contact-lenses without being aware
of it.

 

 

The extreme example is ancient Egypt -- but merely because it lasted
so long; contemporary Zen painting and calligraphy, as already said,
obeys almost as rigid rules of the game. The Egyptian painter unvaryingly
represented the human figure with head in profile, eye frontally, legs
in profile, chest frontally, and so on, showing each part in its most
characteristic aspect. Whether the ordinary Egyptian perceived his fellow
creatures this way we cannot tell, and -- remembering that we perceive
a tilted coin still as a circle, and not foreshortened into an ellipse
-- he probably could not tell either. But we do know that the moment he
translated motif into medium, his vision became stereotyped. It is highly
improbable that conformity was enforced on artists against their will for
a full three thousand years. There exist exceptions to the rule, relief
figures dating as far back as 2400 B.C., [11] which show foreshortening
and dynamic motion; if there had been a taboo on such innovations,
they would hardly have been preserved. But the exceptions became less,
not more frequent as time went by; for reasons beyond our understanding,
Egyptian art, as Egyptian society, remained static, and habit prevailed
over originality.

 

 

Greek art, between the sixth and fourth century B.C. was, compared with
Egypt, in a state of permanent revolution, which carried it within no
more than six or seven generations from the archaic style to the trompe
l'oeil. Yet, although originality and innovation were valued as never
before, it could not avoid developing its own clichés. 'After all,'
wrote Gombrich, 'Greek art of the classical period concentrated on
the image of man almost to the exclusion of other motifs, and even in
the portrayal of man it remained wedded to types. This does not apply
only to the idealized type of physique which we all associate with Greek
art. Even in the rendering of movement and drapery the repertoire of Greek
sculpture and painting has turned out to be strangely limited. There are
a restricted number of formulas for the rendering of figures standing,
running, fighting, or falling, which Greek artists repeated with
relatively slight variations over a long period of time. Perhaps if a
census of such motifs were taken, the Greek vocabulary would be found
to be not much larger than the Egyptian. [12]

 

 

That vocabulary -- and its Euclidean grammar of proportion -- remained
as indelibly printed on European art as the categories of Aristotle
on European philosophy. The Byzantine painter and mosaic maker had
given up the aspiration to copy nature, but he used the approved Greek
stock-formulae to represent faces, hands, gestures, and draperies. Warburg
[13] has shown that the artists of the Renaissance were prone to fall
back on Greek models whenever they wanted to indicate emotion by a gesture
or attitude: he called these emotive clichés
Pathosformeln
.*
'Even Dutch genre paintings that appear to mirror life in all its bustle
and variety will turn out to be created from a limited number of types and
gestures' -- if for instance, one compares them with newspaper-photographs
of crowd scenes. The quotation is again from Professor Gombrich, [14]
whose
Art and Illusion
proved an invaluable source of illustrative
examples.
Skilled routine in perceiving as in thinking, has its positive and
negative side. Without certain conventional rules of the game, which
were acquired by learning but function unawares, we could not make
much sense either of nature or of art. 'The art of seeing nature',
Constable wrote, 'is a thing almost as much to be acquired as the art
of reading Egyptian hieroglyphs.' [15] On the other hand, conventions
tend to harden into rigid formulae -- the matrix freezes up, and makes
us ignore those aspects of reality which do not fit into the schema. The
Greek sculptor is indifferent to individual expression, the Byzantine
painter to anatomy, the Chinese to shadows, and so on. But there exist
far more striking examples of the single-minded neglect by the eye of
anything which the mind does not consider relevant. They are engravings
dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, which show that
even artists reputed for their meticulousness can be indifferent or
blind to features which are considered irrelevant or offensive to the
conventional rules of the game. One of them was Merian, an extremely
skilful illustrator who obviously tried hard to make a faithful 'copy'
-- it looks actually like an architect's drawing -- of the Cathedral
of Notre-Dame. And what happened? ' . . . As a child of the seventeenth
century, his notion of a church is that of a lofty symmetrical building
with large, rounded windows, and that is how he designs Notre-Dame. He
places the transept in the centre with four large, rounded windows on
either side, while the actual view shows seven narrow, pointed Gothic
windows to the west and six in the choir.' [16] He could not go against
the code which governed his visual perception.
Nor could those medieval artists, who drew lions, elephants, and other
exotic animals 'from life', but, incapable of visually digesting the
startling appearance, produced monstrosities reminding one of Greek
chimeras -- creatures compounded of a lion's head, a goat's body and
a serpent's tail. The reason is simple. The codification of experience
into 'rules of the game' is as indispensable in perceptual skills as in
manual or reasoning skills. The learning process starts in the cot and
ends only when the artist has learned to forget what he has learned --
but that is only for the chosen few. The medieval artist -- like the
contemporary amateur taking a correspondence course in draftsmanship --
did not start by drawing from nature, but by learning, from drawing-books,
the tricks and formulae of how to draw heads, hands, and feet, birds,
stags, trees, and clouds. There were hundreds of such works published,
from Villard de Honecourt's
Album of Patterns
in the first half of
the thirteenth century to date -- including such classics as Dürer's
Dresden Sketchbook
or Fialetti's
The True Method and Order to
Draw All Parts and Limbs of the Human Body
-- which seems to contain
every conceivable shape and misshape of ears, eyes, and noses under the
sun. To succeed in drawing an ear with an untutored eye requires genius;
even Dürer, so we are told, got the anatomy of the human eye wrong.
To quote Constable again: an artist who is self-taught is taught by
a very ignorant person indeed. He must acquire a vocabulary -- not
only to express himself, but to read meaning into appearances. The same
Villard de Honecourt whose album of patterns contains the most admirably
schematized swans, horses, ostriches, and bearded heads drew a lion 'from
life', as he assures us -- and produced a chimera. We do not know for how
long he had the chance of looking at the lion or how coherent his sketch
was. But it is evident that where he had to fill in features from memory,
he could only do so by supplanting the forgotten details of the strange
creature by parts of more familiar animals. He had certainly not intended
to falsify deliberately -- any more than Merian did in his drawings
of Notre-Dame. But neither of them could digest the unfamiliar motif
because it could not be resolved into familiar schemata, pigeonholed;
labelled, and confined to memory -- or jotted down in shorthand, as it
were, by means of a ready-made formula. They were in the same position as
the subjects in the psychological laboratory who are made to witness an
unexpected sequence of events -- and, when asked to relate what happened,
give notoriously divergent, unreliable accounts. Their verbal reproduction
is jumbled, not because they lack the skill to express themselves, but
because they were unable to take in a sequence of events which did not
fit their scheme of things.
Not only the medieval artist used formulae like recipes from a
cookery-book. Camper, an eighteenth-century anatomist, wrote a book
on
The Connection Between the Science of Anatomy and the Arts
of Drawing, Painting, Statuary, etc.
, in which he described the
standard procedures of portraiture in his time: 'The portrait painters
of the present day generally describe an oval upon their panel before
the person to be painted sits to be drawn, make a cross in the oval,
which they divide into the length of four noses and the breadth of five
eyes; and they paint the face according to these divisions to which it
must be accommodated, let the proportions themselves be ever so much at
variance.' [17] The oval with its subdivisions represented the matrix
with its fixed code; the filling-in of details was a matter of elastic
strategy.
Convention and Creation
Regardless of the period at which we look, every work of art betrays the
prejudiced eye, governed by selective codes which lend coherence to the
artist's vision, and at the same time restrict his freedom. The ensemble
of these codes provides the 'rules of the game', the routine aspect of
his work; while his 'strategy' must be adapted to the double environment
of motif and medium. The greatness of an artist rests in creating a new,
personal idiom -- an individual code which deviates from the conventional
rules. Once the new idiom -- a new way of bisociating motif and medium --
is established, a whole host of pupils and imitators can operate it with
varying degrees of strategic skill.
It does not mean belittling the creative mind to point out that every
artist has his cookery recipes for the basic ingredients of the dishes
he serves. But we must distinguish between true creativity -- the
invention of a new recipe, on the one hand, and the skilled routine of
providing variations of it. The whole, vexed question of the artistic
value of brilliant forgeries and copies hinges on this distinction
(see