the eye of the artist

I think the artist does look at things differently than other people, but that is something they have learned, not something they were born with. When I first took up watercolors, I just kind of painted from the head. If I saw an apple, my mind registered it as an apple, and since I knew that an apple was red and round so I painted a red circle. At one point I was painting a group of witches and Pat, the teacher, stopped by and told me that I had painted the eyes in the wrong place on the head, that the eyes are actually in the middle of the head, midway between the crown and the chin. Well if that wasn’t the craziest thing I have ever heard, but then she pulled her hair back and put her head in front of me, and dadgum it but she was right.

Actually it’s a common error among beginning artists. The area below the eyes has the mouth and the nose, and all this interesting stuff, while the forehead is pretty boring and a lot of it is covered with hair, so we just think it is bigger. Pat guided me to this book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It has this whole thing about the left and right side of the brain which I only half believe, but the main thesis is that one of the problems of the beginning artist is that he thinks he already knows what things look like, like the apple and the witch’s eyes, so he never really examines things.

Once you start looking at things you notice where the eyes actually are, and that the apple is not really round and that it has a different shape depending on what angle you look at it from, and it is kind of a dark red, and it isn’t the same color all over, and as a matter of fact if you look very closely at it, until your nose is touching it, there are all these patterns of spots and lines and whatnot. And I haven’t even mentioned the reflections and shadows.

I have more to say on the subject, but last Christmas my nephew gave me a pocketknife for Christmas. The way they package things these days it was very handy. Unfortunately I am not so handy, though I guess I can take a little pride in the fact that it took me over a year to slice my finger, so that now I am typing with a big wad of toilet paper scotch taped to my left index finger, and the going is slow so I’m signing off now.