Cat vision

Cats eyes. Look at them. The pupil a narrow slit, vertical through the
iris. Mysterious, intriquing.



One day, many years ago, I was relaxing in the summer sun in front of
our lovely old house. With me were our two cats, Mao and Myrtle. They
were as lazy as I was, "lolling" being the only word to describe their
movements. But where I favoured the sun, they both preferred the shade.
It was hot, I was nearly asleep, and just barely taking in the scene
before me through half-closed eyes. The cats were invisible in their
shaded patches. One of the cats got up and padded over to a new
position, again, in the shade. After a while it moved again. Also into
the shade. With my eyes half closed, where there would normally be an
undifferentiated garden path, I could see a meaningful pattern of light
and shade.

Slowly it became clear that the cats were seeing the garden in this
way, as a meaningful map of light/shade patterns. And that they
responded to this information by moving from shady spot to shady spot.

For me to see the pattern I had to close my eyes and observe the scene
through my eye-lashes, as it were. No such need for the cats though.
They have these specialised pupils which contracts to a narrow vertical
line, eliminating excess light while allowing good depth of field in a
narrow band from the twigs in front of them to the distant prey.

Unblinking. To enable this level of concentration, even blinking is
enhanced by a third eyelid, transparent, quick, clearing the surface of
the eye without obscuring the vision. What immortal hand or eye could
frame THIS fearful symmetry?

Something kept nagging at me, though. I knew that I was right, but what
was the payoff for the cat? What was the evolutionary benefit of such a
visual system? I could even identify a reason not to have such a system
in hunting animal. with our eyes half closed, we see less. It is most
amusing to tease a cat into hunting your hand... A fraction of a second
before it attacks, the pupil opens to its full extent, and if you pull
your hand away at this moment, the cat will leap, but into empty space.
Most embarrassing for the cat! But it needs to see every detail before
pouncing, as also in the momentum of its attack.

It was only in writing this note, that the benefit became clear to me.
Camouflage, first. As the cat moves from shade to shade, it remains
virtually invisible. And then, environmental. In Africa, the big cats
spend the day in shade, and in cold climates, they would seek out the
sunlight. Their superb visual system frees them to do this on a
virtually subconscious level.

All this has a lesson for the artist. Light and shade is the most
important of all skills that the artist has to master. And if we cannot
see light and shade, we can never render it. So the lesson of the cat
is, to see the clear and vital patterns of light and shade, half-close
your eyes.

Even in the 19th century a contemporary critic wrote,"Impressionism is
painting done through half-closed eyes."

Before them the classical artists used a device called a Claude mirror,
a concave mirror backed with black instead of silver. You can make this
at home by taking a flat piece of glass and painting one side of it
black. The other side is a Claude mirror. Looking into it we see the
world in enhanced tonalities... lights remain light, but middle tones
are shifted down towards the darks, very much like a Rembrandt
painting. Colours in the shadow also tend towards Rembrandt-like black
coffee.

A simpler way of achieving the same result is by looking at the sky
through an unexposed film negative, the way we look at eclipses,
except, don't use it to look at the sun so much as to look at cloud
formations. You will be surprised. The skies you see will look
remarkably like Turner skies (Don't forget that Turner idolised Claude,
who is credited with the invention of the black mirror.)

Ruskin, for all his admiration of Turner, abhorred the black mirror and
what he called "Rembrandtism". His reason was simply that to sacrifice
the glories of colour to get good light and shade was too high a price
to pay. We must have good light and shade, yes, but we must also have
good colour (Colour is the type of love, Ruskin said.)

The answer is not to use the Claude mirror to distinguish light and
shade but rather to use the natural method of looking through
half-close eyes, emulating that great hunter of nature, the cat. This
way we see, at the same time, true tonalities, and true colour.

The mind's eye.

Dreams, sleeping dreams I mean, are fugitive and hard to pin down. Many
people believe that our dream experiences are real, and in the sense
that they open a path to our subconscious and the collective
subconscious, they are very important.

When I mentioned "dreamers of dreams", I meant not sleeping dreams,
but that most vital aspect of the true artist, visualising or
daydreaming.

Images, even from daydreaming, are clothed in mystery, and need
exploration and investigation to transform into art. Still, they are
all there, they come as a totality.

If we imagine a woman standing with her back to us, the imagination
holds her in fullness. But, if we want to know what her face looks
like, we cannot see that until we, in imagination, make her turn
around, or move around her. This is the creative aspect of the true
artist, to hold the images, and to dwell in the dream.

The experience of JK Rowlings the day she found the inspiration for the
world of Harry Potter, demonstrates this point. Her train was delayed
for hours, and she was allowed/forced to stay with the images that came
to her, to explore and to delve into this world, until it demonstrated
to her its own laws. She got fully formed characters, places, moods,
and events. All she had to do was to write it down. Mozart had similar
experiences. His manuscripts were written in one draft, with no
corrections or alterations.

So, as you say, you always have to use time to enhance what you put
down originally. Time, drawing on paper, and time, exploring the dream.
This dialogue between paper and fantasy is central. The one drives the
other, and to some extent the images on paper become as powerful as
those held in the imagination. Greatness lies in keeping the dream
alive. Don't let it fade, don't let it die, don't let it go. Even as
you paint, be the dream.

This is why it is vital to draw and paint exactly what we see. Because
until we can accurately render what we see in the real world, we can
never render what we see in the world of myth, memory, and imagination.

For a great artist to paint from real life requires a similar approach,
to see this world as a dream, held in pure consciousness, and to render
that with as much reverence as if it were a vision handed down from the
gods.

Ryno.

The first skill: Imagination.

Of all the skills an artist may or may not have the most basic, and the
most important, is imagination.

This is the one that makes us an artist in the first place. Without it
nobody is an artist. It might even be thought not to be a skill which
can be developed, but a gift, or a god-given talent. WITH this gift,
nothing will stop you from being an artist. Prose, poetry, novels,
screenplays, musical composition, choreography, sculpture, painting,
comic strips, moviemaking, architecture, sandcastles; the imagination
will express itself.

This is the heart of art, of which the photopainters and the mechanical
renderers know nothing. This is Shakespeare, Beethoven, Turner, Rodin.
And this is the approach that we have chosen, or which has chosen us.

If you have this gift of the imagination, apart from real physical
distress, what can limit you? If you were to lose your sight, you would
tell the stories, and if you were to lose your voice, you would play
the music. Degas was blind, and Beethoven deaf, but the imagination
flowed through. Even if we were unable to communicate, as long as we
were able to fight the demons of loneliness, we would simply enjoy the
passing show.

My next note, hopefully, will be on the nature of imagination, and ways
of tuning in to the mind of God (or the collective subconscious).

With all our problems, let's not forget to be grateful for being who we
are.

Art and skill.

"Art is skill", the great Plato said.

This axiom has only been contested once in the history of art: in our time.

First, it was contested by the Modern school who were patently without skill. Cutting up animals and throwing paint at canvas, or painting flat squares with masking tape, piling bricks into a museum, are obviously not skilled activities. This travesty is still continuing because of the aging Modernists who still control all public-funded museums and art schools. More recently they have found a new skill-less art form to espouse: the work of unskilled ethnic groups whose work has to be shown as a kind of "democratisation" of art. They fear skill, because it is recognised by all; and their jobs depend on them alone being the arbiters of artistic merit. These jhighly paid jobs are lifetime appointments, so don't look for any changes here. They will leave only when the die of senility.

But now there is another, much more dangerous group who deny the role of skill in art.

They are the highly successful artists who project colour photographs onto their canvases to trace in pencil outlines and then to color in oil paints. There is NO skill is involved in this. They, like their mortal enemies, the modernists, say that skill is of no consequence; that it is only the result that matters. At least the modernists were honest about their uselessness; these photopainters are dangerous deceivers, selling fraud as art. They need to be exposed and identified for what they are.

Because at the heart of art lies this truth: "Art is skill".

The skill of observation, of empathy, of memory and of visualistion.
The skill of capturing movement in rapid sketches, and studying tone and form in careful studies.
The skill of composition and of arranging color and texture into passages of great beauty.
The skill of handling oil paint, pastel, and watercolour, as well as pencil and charcoal.
The skills of comprehending the secrets of chiaroscuro, palimpsest and paint quality.
The skill of conveying expression and mood qualities to shapes and forms.
The skill of integrating the various elements that make up the work into a seamless and harmonised whole.

One of the greatest flowering of pure skill was in the 19th Century, with artists such as Waterhouse, Burne-Jones, Leighton, Klimt, Alma-Tadema, Corot, Bouguereau, Gerome, Degas, Mauve, Mancini and others.

Why are they unknown today? Simply because the Modernists who control the exhibition and teaching of art, have so decreed. Ironically, the people who shout the loudest about these truly great artists, and who pretend to emulate them, are the fraudsters of photopainting.

Look up these artists of skill in your library, or on the internet, and rediscover the joy of loving art.

Then discover the joy of creating works of skill, truth, power, and beauty.

Ryno.

The picture below is by Waterhouse; Saint Cecilia.

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