Ways of Seeing

He was quickly heads-above other Dutch painters—noticed, too, by respected connoisseurs and art collectors from around Europe, who described him as someday standing equal to or surpassing the Masters. This was 1627. For a century that saw more than five million paintings completed in The Netherlands alone, people dispensing accolades to a young painter— Rembrandt was then 21 years old—must have come upon works they had little comparison to in their lifetimes. Rembrandt still painted in Leiden, sharing a studio with another promising artist, Jan Lievens. Amsterdam was nearly four years ahead for the Dutch artist. What did Rembrandt see in his subjects; how was he able to produce such “promising” and strong pieces? To stand comparison with the Masters—Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Titian—what did collectors and critics see between this young man and centuries of art behind him?

Did Rembrandt see nature and humans as other artists did not? Was his vision of a different sort; did he see the world differently? What is “different” anyway? Different has no graspable meaning to art appreciation. Was his perspective unique to his time? For all time? Ah! … now we have a word! Unique. Perhaps Rembrandt was this. So how could Rembrandt have seen the world uniquely—wholly apart from other artists? The idea of “focus” comes to mind, and so I’ll use it in this brief look at Rembrandt vision.

There is no denying that a change occurred between 1626 and 1627 (and for several years afterwards) to Rembrandt’s perspective and artistic style in how he approached a subject. His perspective narrowed, I think, in a way that brought him closer to his subject. By this I mean physically so, to where he sought to noticed detail of human action, expression, to where he looked at what it was that made people unique from one another. He wanted to expose these in his art. Likewise, he chose to show these differences by finding a stylistic expression on the canvas that used the world in which they lived. Not an idealized world—sitting for a portrait in finery—but one that is soiled by reality of everyday life. And, finally, I see Rembrandt becoming a storyteller—taking what he read and what he saw as inspiration to create a new route for art. Taken as a group then—details of subject and scene, set in realistic terms, and expressed with story elements—we can understand how Rembrandt’s contemporary art critics and collectors (men 40 years older than he, with vast knowledge and (sometimes) expansive appreciation for the various art genres) saw a unique voice in the art world.

When you examine just a few paintings from Rembrandt’s pre-1627 work, what you see is skilled painting, perspective, even practiced elements of drama. Within two years time, you don’t recognize the early, traditional pieces from the sought after—and found—unique seeing. In History Piece (1626), we find a scene typical of the period and of aspiring artists: a group portrait, evenly lighted, temporal expressions, lots of textures. Rembrandt demonstrates his mastering of pigment, shadow and the human form. His mixing of paints creates for the viewer textures aligned with the material he represents. We can almost feel the ridges on the pounded steel shields and armor, the brocade worn by the regent, the men’s hair (less so the stone of the building behind them and the earth in the lower right foreground). A basic study of scene, slight movement; one could almost tell a story, but it would be the viewer’s story, not the artist’s.

That same year, Rembrandt completed Balaam and the Ass, (below) where again we find the basic structure of the aspirant in search of possibility. The lighting is generally even; one can say it comes from the heavens. Only the two people below the risen focal characters are shadowed (and then evenly shadowed as much as the others are evenly lighted). There is more movement in this painting, by virtue of the kneeling ass apparently in reaction to a pummeled it may get from Balaam, the guy holding the stick. However, Balaam seems to lack sufficient expression for the moment; you can hardly say he is brandishing the stick menacingly. Hovering beside Balaam, the angle shows movement, but perhaps we get this from the wings, and how he floats above the scene. He holds a sword, but the idea that he is about to strike with it comes more from knowledge of sword usage than physical gesture; the weapon looks as though it is held at bay, not with kinetic energy of taught muscles readying a blow. The only character in full movement on scale with the story is the ass. Perhaps he knows something we do not? Anyhow, artistic innovation is within Rembrandt’s reach; tradition has yet bound his vision. Within a few months, Rembrandt begins to find and practice his method by which we know him today.

What was Rembrandt looking for? What did he see once he had found it? The difference we see within two years of discovery becomes evident by his demonstration of atmosphere within the painted scene, human expression presented through the presence of story, and movement created in the action of character. What Rembrandt had discovered was the human element that lies behind all art: people in their natural states of work, life, play, and agony. These he took both from society in which he lived and traveled, and the stories told in literature, particularly the Bible. Rembrandt had made his discovery, but to complete the transformation he must have decided that to capture life and story as it could be (or should be), he would have to see it, literally and figuratively, in the light against which it moved. A final discovery must also have taken place, but this was more within the young artist. He must have known that if this could be done, he was the artist capable of succeeding.

Rembrandt’s 1628 Self-Portrait is a fine example of his initial success. Here lies the life that he was looking for, the shop-soiled person, un-stylized and adorned for portraiture. The quality of light found here—likely from a window? —both penetrates through its direct flow from the window, but then also is left to mottle features by indirect, “bent” light. Look how the light penetrates his hair. The outermost hairs shine from the light’s reflection; we see the color of individual hairs. Then, beneath those bright hairs begins the slow layering of the light’s lessening ability to penetrate the hair as it becomes thicker. We can still see in the second layer individual hairs, but now they are closely aligned with the quality of hair as its thickness no longer allows light to reflect its detail, and thus the mass becomes the base form from which the outer layers have allowed the texture and color to be as close to three-dimensional as a flat canvas can allow.

The light source, moving from left to right, hits Rembrandt at the back of the neck, the brightest focal spot on the canvas, and flows over whatever is in its path. Otherwise, it illuminates only by reflection from wherever else it has hit inside the room. This is why we can still see the man’s facial features in shadow, within the reflection of the lighted room. The colors Rembrandt uses slowly fuse with the shadow’s darkness within. He doesn’t suddenly fade to black, but instead sees the color (for there must be color inside the shadow if it is not black and impenetrable) allowable by the reflected light, however faded it may be.

A year later, in 1629, Rembrandt completed Judas Repentant, in which we see the same innovative lighting and reflection techniques. What now is included are his story elements and range of captured human emotions that fill out the storyteller’s needs. A chamber, half filled with light from a source off the canvas, shows men in various stages of movement. Judas kneels on the ground, well lit but since further away from the light source, comes through in filtered light and shadow. His repentance shows as powerful anguish on his face, the twist of his neck, the taught forearms, clasped hands. This position is not a pose, as found in Balaam’s “caught” form with raised arm and frozen expression. Here, Judas is in the midst of his anguish. Let your eyes rest on his figure and you can almost see him as he was a moment before, as he turned his head, and then how he will be a moment from now, how the hands continue their knitted, shaking attitude. We have story in motion.

Likewise, the men refusing Judas’s repentance are caught in movement. They react to Judas’s plea, his tormented remonstrance. The central character has turned away, his hand in gesture of refusal; the human reaction to a human action. The men behind him, one found in deep shadow except for his hand, held out like the central figure, repelling Judas. These men expose their character by the emotions written on their faces: stunned, abhorred, even frightened at what Judas is asking or proposing. Implicated by association. Rembrandt has accomplished the elements of storytelling for this episode. We may know the Biblical story intimately or in passing. Regardless of which, this scene reminds us of the drama found in human frailties.

As Rembrandt progressed, his use of lighting techniques helped him to describe people, scene, and story. He continued to play with how light developed mood, atmosphere, or altered (or perhaps enhanced) human emotion. Rembrandt applied these same techniques to etchings, a form in which he helped innovate as much as that of his canvas techniques. He seemed also to have made a pact with himself: never fail to look for the elements of humanity that can help advance art’s rendering of human emotions, social conventions, age, and storytelling.

Tags: Seeing in Progress, Visual Arts by mark
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Virginia Woolf played with identity in her fiction—what is/is not known about people, and what those people cannot tell. She got these ideas from the way she lived her own life and the lives of those around her. In fact, the early Bloomsbury group talked about these very things: how much can be divulged about one’s life before, (a) embarrassment veils the story, or (b) ridicule from others shows from the revelation of those facts (stories); and, likewise, how much should be told to friends or anyone else (including, perhaps, physicians).

The Bloomsbury group led open lives—much more so than their Edwardian society around them would indulge, and scandalously so compared to their Victorian roots (and yet living relatives)—and talked about every subject, including debates on the moral solvency of suicide. They were a close-knit group, but their evenings together became famous (some might say infamous) in contemporary society for that very openness. How the information came to be known around London did not come so much from the Bloomsbury gang themselves, but through the impressions they made on the visitors who came and went on those famous Thursday night gatherings. Yet…not everything was revealed about their lives. Not in public (even among friends), and not even in their diaries.

Woolf’s novels possibly expose the most intimate details of any Bloomsbury members, deftly folded into literary stories, characters, and settings she chose. She took from herself, her friends, family, and enemies to build those worlds within the word. Her diaries also tell a story, perhaps the most intimate of all details of the interior life she led. By interior, I mean the life within the mind. Woolf used her inner life as models for the interior story that revolutionized literature.

The diaries are fascinating reading. Woolf writes entries where she battles with herself in deciding what she could write in the diaries & what she must leave out. Somehow, she felt the need to keep secrets from the private journal. You might wonder, How odd to censor oneself even in the most intimate of privacies. Perhaps.

A wider issue needs to be considered, I think, in Woolf’s instance, and perhaps for all diarists. VW wrote her diaries for herself, of course. She reread them often, in fact, retracing her thoughts and the processes by which she came to ideas for stories, and conclusions any other subject. She often argued with herself in these pages. Just as well, she learned something and was not afraid to later (or within a single entry) contradict herself, notice the contradiction, and wonder why & where that all came from (or would lead). This is good stuff. We all do this…. but few of us (and fewer as a whole, perhaps) commit these thoughts to paper (or today, the blog???) for later reading. How Virginia Woolf must have understood herself so completely! In all her flaws and contradictions. I’m not sure I’d have the guts to do this so consistently, and brutally, as VW often did. (But it must also be said that VW just as easily could fool herself, at least for a single entry…as human beings are wont to place themselves in the best light.)

But as Woolf wrote her diaries, she had the idea firmly planted in her mind that someday her diaries would be published. By that notion, she felt she had to exercise some prudence in divulging certain informations. Mostly these came from her life. She could be brutally honest and cutting about her family and friends, as her descriptions and assessments of people show. Those of you who keep a diary (you can call it a journal, men, so you don’t feel emasculated) likely understand the need to “hold back” some information.

When I write in my diary, I often find myself (or is the term “catch” myself) holding the pen above the page, wondering-if-and-what-or-how-much I can or should write about me or someone I know. “What if…” I ask myself, “the diary ‘falls’ into the wrong hands before I’m dead?” Yes, self-censorship. Yes, secrets. Yes, they would not be SECRETS any longer!

And…we all have secrets. Mine are…

I’m not telling.

These secrets we carry are likely nothing momentous to life, liberty, or the outside world. At least I don’t think mine are. Nor are mine illegal secrets (perhaps). They are, nonetheless, informations, events, thoughts, that to no one in this life I would want known.

Vanity? Embarrassment? Something else? Oh…maybe. Whatever the case, they are my thoughts, unavailable to any other. Of course, I doubt very much if my life will be written after I die. Nor shall my diaries be published.

In Virginia Woolf’s case, she held back even her final thoughts of suicide, before she actually killed herself. Her last diary entry was just a few days before she drowned herself in the Ouse River, outside London.

Virginia Woolf’s life has been dissected by dozens of literary historians, feminists, misogynists, cranks, and sycophants. From the straightforward, to the intrusive, to the respectful but truthful, to the outright bazaar, VW’s legacy has been a pincushion for writers. (And, I suppose, I’ve now weighed in?) Whatever your own reading of Woolf is based on biographies and her writing, the rumors of her life, surrounding her childhood, possible sexual abuse, the factual mental breakdowns (and the ridiculous treatments for those, including a milk diet) must be taken as a whole to her writerly life, her vivid insight to human nature combined with her revolutionary literary imagination.

That writerly life, I think, is the real treasure we can find from reading VW’s diaries and letters (many volumes of both). The rest seems all so post post-modern tittle-tattle when weighted against many people’s drive to learn about “the dirt” of someone’s life—not to mention schadenfreude.

That we do not know every though of Virginia Woolf (though there is so much) is good. What there is shows how Woolf established that the interior mind was not only valid as subject for literature, but vital to the evolution of character-centered story.

Tags: Literature, Seeing in Progress by mark
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I am no expert on any art form, artist, or work. I like to learn. It is my greatest passion. The best way I know how to learn is to write on what I think about subjects, what I see in them and that surrounds them. It’s a discursive practice that forces the mind to find order in the otherwise blitzing thoughts that clutter human consciousness from nearly one second to the next at every waking moment (hell, why stop there? Dreams change just as quickly, no?). I feel elation when I find associations between one subject and another—particularly between non-art forms (the socio-political milieu; the culture of discontent) and the human condition expressed in art through the millennia. Writing asks for order, concentration on a single (or perhaps two) subject, and, most importantly to me, demands honesty (if not integrity) in how the expressed thoughts use examples and evidence to back up an essayed opinion.

When I write I learn about what I know and where my ignorances yet lie; I see relationships between what I have read and what (and how) I have lived. Now, arts culture is rich in its breath and scope. From novels that describe art, to paintings that tell stories; from film and music that dissect what it is to be a human, to dance & ballet that cross generations and history to express … what else? Humanness. It all matters. It does not matter any more in this century than it did in the last, or the 1800s, or in 900. Humans have not changed substantially in their approaches to life, and less so to art: only the mechanization of ease has made us more diversified, if we so choose to be.

And that is my point, alas, with Ways-of-Seeing.com. When so much arts-culture is available to us, why are so few people able to discuss it beyond the stage of “Oh, I like that!” or “That sucked!”? As I used to explain to my students in writing and literature classes through the years that I taught at Columbia College-Chicago and at St. Pete College in Florida, “I don’t mind that you think something is stupid, but you’d better damned-well have a thought-out and reasoned opinion why you say that. Otherwise, you have proved yourself an ignorant ass.” I believe they got the point after only a small amount of further prodding.

Are people’s lack of discussion of art & arts culture because they don’t know what they think about a novel, a painting, sculpture or play? Or perhaps they don’t know how to think about what they think because they find themselves unable to use language like the “experts” use language on those subjects? If either or both are true, I think these people are being terribly unfair to themselves. They are cheating themselves out of the experience of exchanged thought, opinion and ideas. Possibly they even feel embarrassed about “being wrong,” whatever the hell that means. ‘Tis a pity to be afraid for that.

There are pockets of arts culture lovers out there, worldwide, and they will find their way to these essays, as is their wont. But I don’t wish only to talk with my brethren, so to speak. It is the wider public, the interweb surfers in search of something stimulating, something different, who I’d like to reach across the lines and say “This is what I see, this is how I think today (cuz it might change tomorrow), so What is your opinion?”

I’m sure this blog is already starting off in a variable direction to what other blogs you read “do.” Good. That’s my intention. In the coming days I will have begun to post essays in a variety of categories along the arts culture spectrum: literature, books culture, visual art, dance, theater, music and film. I hesitate to include television because it’s difficult to put your hand in shit and extract a diamond. However, there are some programs that do slip through the cracks in industry. I don’t watch much television for that reason alone (as if there needs to be a second reason), but early in the morning, after my tea and Swiss chocolate habit keeps me going, I will flip through channels. Behold, there are some quality arts programming out there, but I ask myself, What the hell is it doing on at 3 a.m.?

Finally, I must give a nod of recognition and thanks for the Ways-of-Seeing title to John Berger. Berger first produced for the BBC in England the program “Ways of Seeing” in 1972. He and his collaborators presented an arts dialogue by examining how the visual describes our world. Berger developed a book of the same title following the television program, in which were presented seven essays, some using words and pictures, others only the pictorial. In the first chapter, Berger immediately defines his purpose, and I gladly quote those words that are inspirational and were an inspiration as I developed my ideas for this site:

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

“But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”

Tags: Film, Literature, Seeing in Progress, Theater, Visual Arts by mark
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Ernest Hemingway moved to Paris in 1922. He had yet to publish a story. In his pocket was a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson to … just about all the established writers already living on the Left Bank. Chief among them was Gertrude Stein. Another was Ezra Pound, who told Hemingway that if he wanted to write, he would need to read the Russians, the French, the English, etc, etc. Just as well—Pound taught—Hemingway would need to immerse himself in all the art forms. Only then, Pound suggested, can the artist (and by extension, all non-artists, too) really understand how to “see” humanity.

The arts ought to be important in everyone’s life. They seldom are. Living gets in the way. Of course, there are those who make the time to be part of the arts culture.

Ways-of-Seeing.com is for these two sorts of people and all the others. It’s not meant to be educational, though I’ll learn something from the conversation that happens between the essays I write and the comments (perhaps response essays?) the posts receive. It’s all about conversation, experience, a nudge in the direction towards the arts culture—what’s out there and what’s worth spending your limited time on—and away from the stream of media noise grasping at our conscious.

The categories run the gamut of arts culture…and the idiosyncrasies of my thinking on its subjects. What arts do you like? What would you like to see discussed on ways-of-seeing?

Tags: Seeing in Progress by mark
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