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In an Urban World contact with Nature is more and more
important. But what do we see in the natural world? What do we see
when we look at an oak tree ?What on Earth is there ?
Nature is unique and
unpredictable
From light moving across mountains to the shape of a pebble, the
natural environment is visually unpredictable. Nature is unique
and, quite literally, unforeseen.
Man-made environments are pre-visualised in the sense that
streets, rooms and cars are artefacts, all designed. Of course
design can be surprising and the urban world can be rich and
unpredictable. Nevertheless, in visual terms, the large part of the
built environment is fore-seen in that human minds have accounted
for it: you could say it's already been seen for you. This means
that it's relatively easy to get your head round much of what you
see. The geometry of a house is simple compared to that of flowing
water, and it's not hard to describe a pattern of paving stones.
But its very hard indeed to describe changing patterns of rain
drops as they fall on a pavement.
Because they are so unforeseen, natural environments challenge
the senses. And their uniqueness means contact with them is
different every time. So you never know what you're going to hear,
feel, smell or see :
In a field after sunrise, in a light winter frost, your
footsteps pop as they break the frost crust and you feel yourself
sink, slightly, into the earth beneath. A degree colder and you
might not sink, because the ground would be frozen. You can smell
cold in the air mixed with mud like an astringent. The smell of mud
in Staffordshire is different from the smell of mud in Essex:
bedrock, rainfall and soil are all different. Forty yards from an
oak tree you can see grey frost dusting its trunk, but there is
dark, oily looking bark on the side where there was less wind chill
in the night. This tree is similar to, but has different
combinations of shape and colour from any other tree you've ever
seen.
Our senses evolved to rise to the challenge of natural
environments. Even if you're tired or worried, you will still
notice things outdoors : a bird circling, a counter rhythm in long
grass that says "animal", a willow tree changing colour in the wind
. And you won't be able to stop yourself noticing things like this
because your senses will pick them out; they seem to draw attention
to things on your behalf. You may even forget credit cards and
tomorrow's work and go over to the grass to see what's there.
Just opening your eyes in a natural environment prompts you to
attend, to make contact. And if you 're interested and not tired,
the effect can be much more than a diversion. Nature can energise
people. In it our senses set us - and we set our senses - to work.
Not being able to predict what you are going to see raises your
game; whether its hangliding, hill walking or just pottering about
the garden.
In a similar spirit, I try to paint from an assumption that I
don't know what's there. For me, landscape painting is a form of
waking up. A visual contact with a unique environment.
perception is unstable
Even though each painting in this catalogue is of the same tree,
it was impossible to guess the colours and patterns I would see
beforehand. But not only does the natural scene change, the way you
look at it changes too. Each time you look at a scene your senses
notice different things in a different sequence, and you'll react
and feel differently. Heraclitus said you can't step into the same
river twice. But he might also have said that the same person does
not step into the same river twice. Perception, our first hand
contact with nature, is a two way process, and both parties are
always changing.
How does this affect looking at an oak tree?
As the sun rises, the sky behind the top branches shifts
orange-grey to a brighter yellow-turquoise. At the same time upper
boughs become blacker and faintly crimson against the sky. Now look
down to the base of the tree and your eye immediately adjusts to
lower light and you start to see tiny green discs mixed with grey
frost, which itself gets whiter as you look at it. Then you notice
little pink panels scattered around, leaves of rape seedlings not
yet turned green. Look back up, and glare makes it momentarily
impossible to see frost on the tree. But you notice a faint red
line on the horizon cutting behind the main trunk, which helps you
see a greenish element in some clouds and, this time, green in the
exposed black bark, maybe algae - and so it goes on shifting and
changing...
Perception goes on like this because in the dance of the eye
with the environment there is constant interaction, adjustment and
readjustment. Perception does tells us about what's there but,
because it and we are always changing, the process is unstable.
interconnected colours
Complete colour blindness is rare, but people without colour
vision lead normal lives. Full colour vision is a fabulous extra,
bestowed by evolution to help us distinguish a vast array of things
in the environment. Yet at the same time our eyes reveal an
infinity of colour perceptions way beyond what we need for
survival. Visual art, the art of sight, can feed on this.
It is well known that the way we see individual colours is
affected by the colours surrounding them. In perception, colours
are relative, not absolute. If you see thin white water next to
green moss the water looks pinkish . Each colour is effected by
those around it, so you see a colour in its colour world, so to
speak. Natural colour worlds are unique and are an expression of
unique place and time. Surrounded by green leaves in the sun, a
dead oak leaf that didn't fall last autumn will flare an
indescribable salmon-violet: unique colours produced by unique
leaves on a unique tree.
In the human eye that perceives them, the visible
interconnectedness of colour expresses the physical
interconnectedness of nature. And though it may not be easy to
describe the relationship between salmon-violet and green, and
still less the relationship between these things and ourselves,
they can be painted.
the light of nature
A second, often less considered aspect of colour is that the
colours we see at any one time are the result of the colour of the
objects plus the colour of the illumination falling upon them.
Different kinds of illumination falls on objects : direct light
ad an incredibly complicated aray of reflected lights from every
direction, all with their own distinctive colours. Outdoors there
are many kinds of illumination : direct moonlight, reflected light
from a rock face, green light under trees. And in different
situations different lights combine differently: for example, green
light under a canopy makes green leaves greener but pink bark
browner, while direct light passing through the canopy will
introduce a yellower light, and there are reflected lights
everywhere. If wind moves the leaves, or the sun goes in,
everything changes. Illumination, like the rest of nature, is
unique in time as well as space.
The colours we see , therefore, carry information about
illumination. And, with careful observation, a painter paint both
the colour of objects and the illumination falling upon them. By
mixing values of local colour carefully you will mix in common
colour components caused by the illumination, and so get something
of the natural light you see: a unique illumination in a unique
environment. Another thing that painting, uniquely, can
represent.
digital tools
Often people do not fully appreciate that colour and light in
observational painting can be closer to perception than the colour
and light in a photograph. Of course photographs capture many
aspects of the world and painters use photographs in all sorts of
ways. But it's important to realise that both digital and film
cameras record colour as millions of single points in the image
which take no account of the surrounding field, so the
interconnectedness of colour in human vision is lost. Printing the
photograph further distorts colour relationships by globally
compressing the colour range to the limited range of the print
process.
Sensation - colour interaction, adaptation effects, illumination
and the dance of the eye with the enviroment - is, I think, better
engaged by eye, pigment and brush.
Nevertheless, like a birdwatcher using binoculars or a diver
using scuba kit, painters can use technology to get closer to
nature. For example, digital analysis of a photograph can be the
difference between seeing and noticing:
The image above is a digital source image for the painting "Flock of Pigeons" and shows an oak tree
seen from below. The image below shows a narrow colour range
selected from the photo, set on a black background. This selection
revealed a colour distribution pattern (a colour-texture) that I
hadn't noticed outdoors but, having seen the image, when I went
back in similar conditions, I did.
The pattern carries a lot of information. Notice how close the
reflected light on the twigs is to the colour of the sky; notice
too how many of the strongest reflections lie at right angles to
the direction of sunlight, an effect of geometry and light I would
never have noticed without the digital analysis of a
photograph.
early visual processing and grouping
effects
Vision theory has emphasises how much processing takes place
early on in the visual pathway from eye to brain. Edge detection,
for example, starts in the retina. As data comes together on the
way to and in the brain there are a range of processes
characterised by the active grouping of visual elements that occur
spontaneously.
For example, from a certain distance, twigs on a winter oak tree
group into clusters forming a pattern of blobs, but as you walk
towards the tree, blobs and pattern disappear. It's a strange
effect and can render a row of oaks against the sky simultaneously
sinister and toy like. When is a pattern a pattern ? One answer is
: when there is sufficient similarity between visual elements and
they are sufficiently regular in their distribution to be
recognised as a pattern. In other words patterns appear and
disappear in vision without our doing anything about it. In
computing terms this activity, is "bottom up" rather than "top
down". So you don't have to know anything about what you're looking
at for it to happen, it just does.
As a painter, I find it helpful to think of vision like this
because it describes perception as a productive activity, prompting
us to notice things. These grouping processes evolved to "make
sense" of the visually messy natural environments I'm interested in
and are there to be discovered. There are many unpredictable colour
and texture groupings visible in an oak tree over the seasons.
You also see these affects as you paint. It's hard not to. One
difference between ordinary seeing and seeing as you paint is that
as you paint you can manipulate and play with grouping processes.
You can stop them, take them forward, abandon them, switch elements
(for example, look at effects of shapes instead of colour) and so
on. Things that take place spontaneously in vision in painting can
be can be manipulated and become part of a picture, transforming
events in perception into man made objects.
painting oak trees
If we live in a country where oak trees grow, most of us will
have some idea of what an oak tree looks like. But an "idea" of an
oak tree is not going to be like an oak tree in the senses. As
we've seen, you never quite know what that's going to be, even if
you look at it from the same place, at the same time of day and in
the same light, two days running!
Being reminded of this fact is not a philosophical game. It's
one thing to value nature in your head â€" and another to
experience it. Visual experience, if attended to, tells us that the
things of nature are uncountable but connected; unpredictable but
patterned; nothing to do with us and everything to do with us.
Trying to paint what you see is trying to paint perception, and
nature is at work within perception. Perception gives us real
information about the environment. That's why it's useful. But a
realist painting is not a natural object. It's a thing of culture -
a cultural thing with a fascinating double life.
You cannot make an oak tree, but an oak tree can help you make a
picture of what its like to see one.
Edited by David
Davies.
First published as a catalogue Essay for "Oak" an exhibition
held at Vertigo, Great Eastern Street, Shoreditch, London in 2006
.
Catalogue available from the contact page of this site.
Copyright Stephen Taylor, 2006.
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