Looking at Art

By Peter V. Moak

This guide contains a new approach to looking at and appreciating art. One not found elsewhere.

It makes you aware of abilities you already have to see things in various ways. The key to these abilities is what I call the visual ego, the place between your eyes from which you see the world. The guide then describes a series of particular ways of seeing and making works of art. Finally, it applies these ways, which I call perspectives to works of art, painting, sculpture, architecture, and the decorative arts covering a period of some seventy thousand years. The results I find to be amazing, including new understandings and appreciation of many works of art and artists and their place in the history of art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Sep 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781490768724

Peter V. Moak

Peter Moak received a PhD in art history from the University of Pennsylvania and taught art history at the University of New Hampshire. This guide is the product fifty years of trying to better understand looking at art. This effort began with the work of Gauguin, Czanne, and Picasso and lead in time to the importance visual ego for seeing and making art and to numerous discoveries about the history of art and the way see art.

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Copyright 2016 Peter V. Moak.

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ISBN: 978-1-4907-6873-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4907-6872-4 (e)

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Contents

Looking At Art

The Visual World and the Visual Ego

Perspective

Perspectives Used in the History of Art

The Visual Ego and the History of Art

Notes

Looking At Art

For a work of art to look its best it must be seen as it was seen when it was made. We have various ways of looking at the world. The particular way in which we need to see a work of art is one of these. Seeing a work in the right way is essential to its understanding and appreciation. From time to time, place to place, people to people, culture to culture, nation to nation and artist to artist ways of seeing differ. To understand these ways of seeing which I call perspectives I begin by describing of how I see the world.

The Visual World and the Visual Ego

I open my eyes and light passes through the lenses and forms pictures on my retinas. From these tiny pictures my brain places before me a life sized, lens projected, stable, upright, continuous picture of objects in space, my visual world. I see this world in two basic ways, unaligned and aligned. In both cases I am present as my visual ego, an imagined self composed of my two eyes and the space between them.¹ I can also be present as a place behind my eyes I call my physical ego in relation to which I perceive the parts of my body positioned in space. With my physical ego the visual world is remote and unfocused. With my unaligned visual ego which can vary in size my view changes when I move my eyes, head or body, when I widen or narrow my eyes and when I reduce or enlarge my visual ego. With my unaligned view my focus continually shifts and the world appears separate from me except for those parts of me I can see. I understand this to be the real world although I know that it is an event in my brain. I acquire an aligned view by being fixed before an object and imagining a point on a lateral contour of the object aligned with a point at he corner of my horizontally oriented visual ego. This places me in the visual world. When I maintain this relationship other contours of the object are sequentially seen fixed in relation to my stationary horizontal ego and the object is seen regularized, abstracted and idealized making it comprehensible and memorable. As my ego continues to be aligned in this way the contours of adjacent objects are seen sequentially fixed relative to my ego and I see the visual world as a coherent three dimensional structure with my horizontal ego an integral part. When I change the size of my visual ego relative to an object it moves me in and out of the optically structured visual world. When larger than an object my lines of sight converge on the object which is seen across space. When small the lines of sight spread out to contours. An object seen with the small ego appears close by which can make a distant object appear life sized. This phenomena is called constancy scaling. The aligned ego moves without interrupting alignment by being peripherally aligned with the next object before I move my eyes. If my eyes move before my being aligned with the next object the next object appears unaligned and not visually connected with the first. Thus my visual world can be unfocused and remote, unaligned with a shifting focus or as an aligned, coherent, geometric structure with my horizontal ego an integral part. All this provides me with a visual grammar that I use to guide my progress in the natural world.²

Perspective

My visual grammar might seem new, but it is not. This is I think normal human vision in which we move unconsciously, instantly and continually from one way of seeing to another creating an ordered view of an ordered world. The aligned way of seeing objects may sound similar to making a work of art and my experience is that it is just so. A work of art is by my definition a thing made by a human being using the visual ego in a particular way which I call the perspective. Becoming aware of the visual ego and the different ways things can look is all important when it comes to works of art. To see a work of art you must see it as it was seen when it was made by using the correct perspective. Finding the right perspective is by trial and error. When you find the right perspective a work of art looks its aesthetic best, aesthetic best being a universal resulting from a coherent relationship between parts and not a matter of taste, taste being a social or individual preference. The perspectives I call frontal and Oriental are the most widely used. I call the perspective that aligns objects and the small ego frontal perspective and objects aligned with the large ego Oriental perspective. With Oriental perspective only the center is clear. Frontal perspective provides a clear view of a more three-dimensional appearing objet. (Using frontal perspective in the context of a wide view can result in a composition that is both widely coherent and three-dimensional).

The use of a particular perspective to make a thing seems unique to the modern human being, Homo sapiens sapiens. Things made by animals and our prehistoric relatives the Neanderthals do not depend on a particular use of the visual ego. Differences in perspective form patterns in history of art. Differences in perspective seem to follow the Noah’s Ark theory of the peopling of the earth which begins in Africa and spreads from there.³ Changes in perspective can also follow the evolution of a culture.