Studio Seeing: A Practical Guide to Drawing, Painting, and Perception

By Michael Torlen

Opens with several first-person anecdotes about the author’s life as a practicing artist and a discussion of the intellectual lineage of his vision-based pedagogy. Many more anecdotes from the author’s teaching appear in most chapters.

The author discusses perception as it benefits the artist in the studio. Perceptual laws govern both our experience of seeing and the artist’s process of creating. The book presents a proven process developed by the author over many decades of teaching and studio practice that the artist can apply to their own painting/drawing and/or teaching. The painting and drawing principles in the book are essential and yet not generally taught or understood. They will benefit anyone learning how to draw/paint or advance their practice. The book will also help practitioners to make rapid progress and to avoid clichéd, overused solutions. It also offers insights and discussions of interest to art lovers and “Sunday painters.” It is for everyone who enjoys viewing and thinking about art.

Integrated into the text are more than one hundred images—works of art by well-known historical and contemporary artists and students, photographs, and diagrams—to reinforce the concepts presented. A recap section ends each chapter, followed by an exercise, or group of related exercises, to encourage and guide the practitioner in immediate application of the concepts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jun 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781789387919

Michael Torlen

Michael Torlen is a visual artist, author, and Professor Emeritus of the School of Art+Design, Purchase College, State University of New York, where he taught painting and drawing, and received the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. He earned his BFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and his MFA at The Ohio State University. Although known for his seascapes of Maine, he also has a body of semi-abstract work about family, cancer, love, and death. Torlen maintains a studio and lives in Westbrook, Maine, with his wife, author and educator, Eleanor Phillips Brackbill. For more information: www.michaeltorlen.com www.michaeltorlenauthor.com

Book preview

STUDIO SEEING

Dedicated to Hoyt L. Sherman, Harold Gregor, and Charles Moone

STUDIO

SEEING

A PRACTICAL GUIDE

TO DRAWING,

PAINTING, AND

PERCEPTION

Michael Torlen

First published in the UK in 2023 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2023 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2023 Intellect Ltd

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Contents

Figures

Foreword by Julian Kreimer

A practical-meditative lineage

Teaching

Learning to see the ground

Preface

Learning to see

The brick

The lineage

Introduction

1 The Fear Factor

The bare canvas

Into the void

Course of action

Fear’s tyranny

Mistakes and accidents

Part-to-part

Recap

2 How We See It, How We Don't

The 3D Cues

Perspective

Binocular vision

Light and shadow

Relative motion

Recap

Exercises—Two or one-eyed

3 The Artist’s Vision

The monocular cues

Constancy

2D visual cues

Position

Shape-size

Overlap

Value contrast

Color contrast

Hierarchy and interaction

Recap

Exercise—2D cues

4 More About Seeing

Parts and wholes

The Gestalt contribution

Think ahead

Arnheim

Where and what

Figuring the ground

Object-directed vs. ground-directed seeing

Past experience, purpose, and actions

Recap

Exercises—Parts and wholes

5 Beyond Face or Vase

Head first

Figure-ground

Not negative and positive

Edge-condition

Yes and no

Intentions, meanings, and context

Recap

Exercises—F/G

6 Forces in the Field

Inner necessity

Closure

Coincidence of edge and continuity

Locales

Recap

Exercises—Three Cs

7 Line

Positioning line

Contour

Gesture

Blind-contour

Cross-contour

Recap

Exercises—DIY

8 Value

Positioning value

Reserving the light

Adding and subtracting

On readymade

Adding wash and brush

Elegance or clumsiness

Recap

Exercises—Plus and minus

9 Brush, Paint, Process

Shape paint, don't paint shapes

Color studies

Bridging Triangle

DLWCDI

Recap

Exercise—DLM

10 Muscles and Marks

The body against itself

Four variables

Pressure

Tempo

Duration

Direction

Deliberate practice

Recap

Exercises—PTDD

11 Figuring Where

Plumb, level, and square

The frame

Sighting and measuring

2D to 2D

Linear perspective

Aerial perspective

Sfumato

Recap

Exercises—Devices

12 Unmediated Response

Focal point

Approximation

The Great Law

Recap

Exercise—Focal point

13 Fixing

Jumping parts

Move it

Add more of it

Build a bridge

Reverse the overlap

Adjust the scale

Do something else

Recap

Exercises—Ground-directed

14 The End Is the Beginning

Limits of language

Nothing changes if nothing changes

Meaning and metaphor

Outside the studio

Last words

Endnotes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

Figures

1.1: Tom Burckhardt, FULL STOP (partial installation shot), 2004–05.

1.2: Gary Bower, Waiting 111 Bonnieux, 1994–95.

1.3: Michael Torlen, Light from Above (from Ocean Blues), 2019–20.

2.1: Julie Langsam, Gropius Landscape: Bauhaus, 2014.

2.2: Railroad tracks.

2.3: Grant Wood, New Road, 1939.

2.4: Focused Buddha with leaves out of focus.

2.5: Unfocused Buddha with leaves in focus.

2.6: Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait, 1660.

2.7: Student, Egg value study, n.d.

2.8: Giotto di Bondone, Joachim's Dream, c.1305.

2.9: Pierre-August Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881.

2.10: Hans Holbein the Younger, Ambassadors, 1533.

3.1: Chairs.

3.2: Rachel Schaming, Boot, 2011.

3.3: Blueberries.

3.4: Two-marks drawing by the author, 2021.

3.5: Three-marks drawing by the author, 2021.

3.6: Four-marks drawing by the author.

3.7: Kim Do, Over Under Ovals, 2015.

3.8: Hoyt Sherman, Overlay Demonstration, Cézanne and Visual Form, 1951.

3.9: Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes, c.1620.

3.10: Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Igor Stravinsky, 1920.

3.11: Christopher Taylor, Three Figures, 2019.

3.12: Draperies.

3.13: Stephen Alcorn, Drapery Study, 1979.

3.14: Tomatoes.

3.15: Color wheel by the author, 2022.

4.1: NO PARKG.

4.2: Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503.

4.3: Hoyt L. Sherman, 1965.

4.4: Roy Lichtenstein, I Can See the Whole Room…and There's Nobody in It!, 1961.

4.5: Doorway.

5.1: The Art Guys (Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing), Head First (detail), 2003.

5.2: Figure-ground face-vase by the author, 2022.

5.3: Thomas Eakins, The Thinker, 1900.

5.4: Vincent van Gogh, Oleanders, 1888.

5.5: Student, Still Life, n.d.

5.6: Lois Dodd, Iris + Tree, 2011.

5.7: John Torreano, DMs & Hot Stars, 2015.

5.8: Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait with Monkeys, 1943.

5.9: Fred Wilson, Metalwork, 1793–1880, from the exhibition Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson, c.1990.

5.10: Fred Wilson, Metalwork (detail), 1793–1880, from the exhibition Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson, c.1990.

6.1: Closing a circle drawing by the author, 2022.

6.2: Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Four Dancers, 1925.

6.3: Masaccio (Maso di Giovanni), The Expulsion from Paradise, post-restoration, c.1425.

6.4: Sonya Sklaroff, Staircase Garden, 2020.

6.5: Sonya Sklaroff, photograph with Staircase Garden, 2020.

6.6: Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Three Musicians, Fontainebleau, summer 1921.

6.7: Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), The Entombment of Christ, c.1516–26.

6.8: Diagram identifying locales in Titian's The Entombment of Christ by the author. 2022.

6.9: Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), The Deposition, 1507.

6.10: Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), © ARS, The labor agent who had been sent South by Northern industry was a very familiar person in the Negro counties, 1940–41. Panel 28 from The Migration Series.

7.1: Student, Seated Model, n.d.

7.2: Student, Gesture Drawing Two Figures, n.d.

7.3: Student, Gesture Drawing Three Figures, n.d.

7.4: Eugène Delacroix, Sketches of Tigers and Men in Sixteenth- Century Costume, c.1828–29.

7.5: Student, Figure Model (detail), n.d.

7.6: Honoré Daumier, A Clown Playing a Drum, 1825–79.

7.7: Apples, drawing by the author, 2021.

7.8: Student, Ski Boot, n.d.

7.9: Student, Seated Model, n.d.

7.10 Student, Driftwood, n.d.

8.1: Student, Hanging Fabric, n.d.

8.2: Georges Seurat, The Black Bow, c.1882.

8.3: Student, Three Boxes, n.d.

8.4: Adrian Lyjak, Paper Bag and Drapery, n.d.

8.5: Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, Study of a Man, c.1810–20.

8.6: Leonardo da Vinci, Drapery for a Seated Figure, 1470s.

8.7: Kara Walker, Negress Notes, 1996.

8.8: Student, Portrait Study, n.d.

9.1: Rembrandt van Rijn, Night Watch, 1642.

9.2: Jan Vermeer, Woman with a Water Jug, 1660–62.

9.3: Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Blue Pot, c.1900–06.

9.4: Computer-enhanced infrared digital capture of Cézanne's Still Life with Blue Pot.

9.5: Zach Ippolito, Chair in the Woods, n.d.

9.6: Student, Black Box, n.d.

9.7: Student, Driftwood and Umbrella, n.d.

9.8: Student, Still Life with Cow Skull, c.2009.

9.9: Jon Campbell, Portrait of Jacek, 2020.

9.10: Julia Dixon, Tim, 2005.

9.11: Christine Elmore, Bridging Triangle, n.d.

9.12: Karin Yamamoto, DLWCDI, n.d.

9.13: Student, Glass Jug and Bottles, 2009.

9.14: Karin Yamamoto, Nine-Position Gray Value Scale, n.d.

9.15: Karin Yamamoto, Nine-Position Chromatic Value Scale, n.d.

10.1: Vincent van Gogh, Street in Saintes Maries-de-la-Mer, 1888.

10.2: Student, Hands, 2005.

10.3: Student, Cow Skull and Table, n.d.

10.4: Mary Cassatt, Maternal Caress, c.1891

10.5: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Study, c.1893.

10.6: Student, Copper Beech, n.d.

10.7: Rembrandt, Portrait of Jan Six with Dog, 1647.

10.8: Amy Sillman, XL12, 2020.

11.1: The Boyle Family, (Mark Boyle, Joan Hills, Sebastian Boyle, Georgina Boyle), The Sand, Wind and Tide Series, 2012. National Galleries of Scotland. Presented by the Peter Moores Foundation.

11.2: Edgar Degas, A Ballet Dancer in Position Facing Three-Quarters Front, 1872–73.

11.3: Chuck Close, Self Portrait, 2000–01.

11.4: Albrecht Dürer, The Draughtsman of the Lute, 1523.

11.5: Leonardo da Vinci, Perspective study for the staircase and horses (for the Adoration of the Magi), c.1481.

11.6: Hoyt Sherman's Base Line. Visual Demonstration Manual. The Ohio State University Archives.

11.7: Julie Mehretu, American, b. 1970. Stadia II, 2004.

11.8: Harold Gregor, Illinois Landscape #120, 1992.

12.1: Paul Cézanne (French, 1839–1906), Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from the Bibémus Quarry, c.1895–99.

13.1: Mark Nilsson, Portrait of MT, 2010.

13.2: Hans Hofmann, The Golden Wall, 1961.

13.3: Jasper Johns, Racing Thoughts, 1983.

14.1: Nathan Vincent, Untitled, 2002.

14.2: Nathan Vincent, Hand Grenade, c.2019.

Foreword

Despite my nearly twenty years of teaching college students, I was stumped. Foundation drawing was as new for me as for them, fresh from high schools and weekend art classes to the forbidding cinder-block studio of art school. Their faces shifted between expectation, suspicion, and disappointment as I asked them to think about the whole rather than the parts, to perceive shadows and light as a series of relationships, and other basics of picture-making. To them, light and shadow were distractions to seeing the objects as they are, and their approach to starting a drawing was to look at one point and drill into the details of that spot, ignoring as long as possible the connection to anything else.

Frantic, I remembered conversations with Michael Torlen in our three years’ overlap at Purchase College, and in particular to an idea he elaborated in several ways—that in helping a student to see, the teacher had to recognize that the process was twofold: on the one hand, it required a series of gradual stepped exercises so that students could absorb the new way they were being asked to see. On the other hand, he would often bring up stories populated by Zen and jazz masters, in which a profound transformation could come, after many small steps, all at once.

It is a testament to Torlen's book that I sincerely wish I could have read it before teaching foundation drawing. I was familiar with many of the now-classic drawing books—in particular, Betty Edward's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and Kimon Nicolaide's The Natural Way to Draw, published after his death in 1938, that encapsulated Nicolaides's drawing class at the Art Students League in the pre-Abstract-Expressionist days of New York City. The problem with classics is that their universal influence means that their exercises have become a standard issue from middle school on up, and, as any teacher knows, nothing reeks to students worse than the stale exercises they did in years past.

Students have been looking their whole lives, but to see themselves seeing, to realize how limited their way of seeing is and to harness their own vision, constitutes a nearly existential shift and one that they often resist with tremendous force. How to reassure a class that this new way of seeing will not only be helpful but won't spoil their hard-won realism—usually a rigid style of volumetric or stylized drawing used to depict people in a standardized way. In Torlen's words, This is easy enough to say, but difficult to do (28, this volume). Torlen's lessons provide a clear and exacting guide on how to move not only beyond this doubt but also through the fear that accompanies any change.

One of the many surprises in this book is Torlen's inclusion of emotions as a creative constant, and how to utilize them as one more element that, with slow and methodical practice, can be transformed by students into welcome tools. He deals head-on with the frustration and fear that so many art students face with dread, and which seasoned artists learn to find useful as an engine of studio ideas. Here we sense the cumulative effect of Torlen's meditative practice, the ability to both feel the emotion and, as Buddhist's counsel, observe one's emotions while experiencing them, to feel both the river of our thoughts and stand on a bridge looking down over them as they rush by.

A practical-meditative lineage

Torlen's teaching (and this book, which distills decades of experience) comes out of a particularly American lineage, of which his teacher, Hoyt Sherman, at The Ohio State University, played an emblematic role. This Zen-influenced lineage can be traced back to Arthur Wesley Dow, Georgia O'Keeffe's art teacher at Columbia University, whose friendship with Ernest Fenollosa, the curator of Asian Art at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, nudged Dow's understanding of Japanese aesthetics, particularly embodied in Hokusai and his fellow woodblock printmakers. Dow's students, in particular O'Keeffe and the influential cubist Max Weber, became champions of Modernism in the United States, standing in opposition not only to the academic system that had structured western art training for several centuries but more locally, in opposition to the fin-de-siècle (art-for-art's sake) stance championed by Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase at New York's Art Students League and which owes its pose, at least in part, to the unmatchable hauteur of the Anglo-American James McNeil Whistler.

Many young American artists of O'Keeffe's generation served in the Allied Camouflage Corps of World War I, applying Dow's modernist ideas to functional uses. Most influential among the artist-veterans was the color-theorist Edward Munsell, whose systematization of color laid the groundwork for the enormously influential color-consultants who shaped the chromatic trends of the mass-market industrial explosion of the twentieth century.¹ The camoufleurs’ tactical need to understand perceptual processes—in particular color/value perception, and context-based seeing—transformed art education, treating vision not simply as the conduit to representation, but as a trainable skill with applications far beyond gallery walls.

Torlen's own mentor, Hoyt L. Sherman, extended this perceptuality lineage, collaborating with colleagues in The Ohio State University psychology department to design illusionistic props to teach not just artists, but Air Force pilots, football players, and students from other disciplines who would benefit directly from a formal sharpening of their perceptual apparatus.² This emphasis on seeing through patterns and relationship flows from two interwoven sources, both of which entered the English-speaking world after fleeing from the Nazis: one was the Gestalt School of perceptual psychology, in particular Rudolf Arnheim's cornerstone book, Art and Visual Perception, and the other was the contemporaneous applications of these theories by the storied Bauhaus.

Despite their influence, Torlen's teaching hews closer to the idiosyncratic and highly influential Hans Hofmann, best known for his famous push and pull of pictorial space, whose emphasis on the internal dynamics of a painting informs Torlen's remarkably useful ideas on the closure of shapes and of each painting's locales.³ While Abstract Expressionism's Sturm und Drang took over many painting programs from the 1950s through the 1980s, Torlen extended the practical-meditative interdisciplinary tradition, linking aesthetic ideas going back to the European Renaissance to Asian wisdom traditions and recent neuroscience. It's not surprising that, parallel to Torlen's own immersion in perceptual theory, back in his native Southern California, Robert Irwin took such vision-based pedagogical into the realm of optically illusionistic installations.⁴ As Irwin's example suggests, one of the benefits of perception-focused studio training is that it is equally useful for abstract and figurative art, as well as a basis for any visual or creative practice.

Teaching

Diana Horowitz, landscape painter and an early student of Torlen's at Purchase College, tells me that he was, hands-down, the best painting teacher she had. It wasn't that he bridged their distance, trying to befriend the students as many teachers do—in fact, she laughs, He didn't even like me—but rather that Torlen, unlike some of his macho Abstract-Expressionist colleagues, was the uncool guy, in the trenches, showing students how to see. The cool people were making gigantic things; what he taught was modest.⁵ She adds that it was only several years later, when she taught her first class at the Art Institute of Chicago, that she looked back on his lessons and realized how useful his method had been: Looking holistically is very hard. I remembered everything he showed us.

Another early student, Jeanne Markel, remembers that in Torlen's first lesson he taught us how to clean a paintbrush, to get them really clean. She says it with the same tone of simple-yet-profound Zen revelation with which Torlen told me of being told by Richard Artschwager to leave a small pile of sweepings on the floor at the end of the day so as to have something to start on in the morning.⁶ He taught the nuts and bolts, which Markel relished as a transfer student to the art department.

Like Hoyt Sherman, Torlen often returned to Cézanne, to his prescient understanding of percept, seeing before concept, and how the Frenchman would focus on seeing without volition, utilizing what the Nobel-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel calls bottom-up thinking.⁷ Torlen notes how Cézanne's color modulation, laying down patches of paint to describe small sensations, and his use of coincidence of edge to shift our focus, differs subtly but significantly from the usual lessons of modeling value, in which a standardized method is applied to depict objects in space and to bend space to the artist's will. Unlike the now-ubiquitous tutorial videos and the vast majority of art-training manuals, Torlen's book eschews formulas of how to make a picture, emphasizing instead the much harder to teach but infinitely more valuable understanding of how to see, explaining along the way the process by which that seeing happens.

Learning to see the ground

In the decade since I first met Michael Torlen, our shared context, what he might call the ground to our shared reality, has splintered. Every week brings a bouquet of essays on the epistemological divide in the United States—holiday tables fraught with the terror of inflaming a relative's different reality—we have lost a collective sense of what is real and what is false. One of the creepiest examples of how powerful a perceptual ground can be was Facebook's secret experiments to control users’ emotions through surreptitiously tweaking the negativity of their feeds. A more hopeful example, as Torlen writes, is the civil rights movement that swept through the United States in the summer of 2020. The sense of context, allowing abuses to be seen as systemic rather than as one-off incidents, serves as a significant example of shifting the view from object-directed to ground-directed that paves the way for concrete changes to address racist injustice.

The magic that Torlen conveys at the transformation of two-dimensional (2D) to three-dimensional (3D) and back again initiates the sense of wonder that precedes systematic study of how we see. As in a studio classroom, theoretical concepts are brought to life with examples that range from Rembrandt to Trader Joe's grocery store, exercises range from simple invitations to perceive our own vision, to involved multi-step drawing projects, always bringing the reader back to a state of beginner's mind, open to learning. He calmly and convincingly puts to rest questions that plague drawing classrooms, like why it is more useful to draw from life than from photographs. Reading Torlen's lessons, I am struck by how many times I think, Oh, that's the term I needed in class!

As we've seen in the first decades of our century, learning to see reality is as much a civic virtue as an artistic one. Michael Torlen's voice and experience come through his text, guiding us on how to learn and teach this fragile but fundamental skill.

—Julian Kreimer

Preface

My mother was a painter. She set up her paints and easel in the garage, or in the kitchen, or in an extra bedroom. She painted at night and on weekends, took lessons at the local art club, and practiced portraiture using family members as models. On weekends, she sometimes took me along to visit the San Diego Museum of Art.

During one outing, a painting of a bouquet of flowers on a table captivated me. As I looked at the picture, I noticed the elements that made up the artwork—the vertical, rectangular canvas, the texture of the paint, the colors, the brushwork, the lines, and the shapes. I was fascinated to realize that I also saw three-dimensional (3D) objects—the table and the flowers—and paint on a two-dimensional (2D) canvas. How did the artist make this magic happen?

Learning to see

After some early fits and starts, including an industrial drafting program at a local junior college, different college majors, and a few semesters at San Diego State College, I made my way to Cranbrook Academy of Art. Prior to entering Cranbrook, most of my academic experiences were frustrating. For example, one teacher said in critiquing my work, That is good color. The comment flattered me. But I had questions. What was I to do with this information? What is good color, and what makes it so? The statement boosted my ego, but not my understanding.

Critiques, too, were disappointing. No one explained why certain things seemed to work and others did not. Much of the language was fuzzy-minded. The instructor’s personal feelings, opinions, and art-speak—a vague yet complex conflation of terms from other disciplines—dominated most critiques and assignments.

After my first year at Cranbrook, I returned to San Diego for the summer and took my portfolio to Harold Gregor, an artist-teacher who had a degree from The Ohio State University. As we discussed it, Gregor noted structures, relationships, and clichés of which I had been completely unaware. I could not see what he was seeing until he pointed them out. I was fascinated. I had never heard anyone articulate so clearly what they were seeing