Trusting your Eyes

Mary Beth McKenzie, the highly acclaimed figurative artist observed, "Artists make things so much easier for themselves when they learn to trust their eyes".

Self Portrait, Mary Beth McKenzie (Image courtesy of the artist)

I was alluding to this aspect of art-making yesterday in a blog about "the selective eye". The artist's eye is a most important tool, not only for observing and informing the artist, but also in the other sense, the inner eye, which develops with experience, training, discernment, time and work.

Trusting one's eyes is almost the first important step towards becoming an artist. I was lucky enough to learn to draw by the Nicolaides method, always drawing from real life, using contours and gesture drawing to learn of the subject. "There is only one right way to draw – physical contact with all sorts of objects through all the senses," Kimon Nicolaides declared, and it is true, I have found, for me. His method involved not looking at the paper, but fixing one's eyes intently on the subject being drawn, to hone the eye-hand connection.

Once that eye-hand connection is made, you begin to be able to trust your eyes and know that somehow, almost miraculously, it sometimes seems, the drawing will work out alright. Later, I learned to trust my eyes in terms of colour selection and assessment, so that the paintings seem, mostly, to work from the colour point of view. But this trust is an ever-developing, ever-active business. The more you draw and paint, the more you observe and use your eyes in every possible way, the better your eyes serve you to create art. Precious tools for an artist - it behoves us all to take care of our eyes, literally and figuratively!
 

"Seeing with new eyes"

I am still immersed in drawing spring flowers and was thus thinking further about looking at things as if it were for the first time. Change the light that is shining, for instance, on a white azalea, and it instantly becomes a new entity. That is an aspect of working from real life, particularly en plein air, which makes for perpetual challenges and interest. You have to decide to "freeze" light at one stage or another and then try and keep to that consistent light play. Otherwise, your drawing or painting can become rather incoherent if you are hewing to realism. On the other hand, it also means that you can do a completely new work, a new "landscape", without moving from your chosen site.

It is not only in visual art that seeing things in an active way brings rewards. I came upon a statement Professor Alison Richard, Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University (www.cantab.org), made in a newsletter about fundraising for Cambridge's 800th Anniversary Campaign. In it, she quoted Marcel Proust saying, " the real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes" and celebrated that the Campaign had brought new eyes to Cambridge. Fresh appraisals of all and everything are often worthwhile - from how the US Government is run, thanks to the Obama Administration's new eyes, to an interpretation by Ian Bostridge (www.ianbostridge.com) at the Savannah Music Festival (http://www.savannahmusicfestival.org) of Schubert's songs, that I have not heard since I listened to a long-ago recital by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. If one is open and curious, new landscapes abound.

Listening to the Schubert songs, I reverted to thinking visually, seeing colours in Ian Bostridge's beautiful sounds and interpretations. Somehow, in some of the Lieder, there were effects that Sonia or Robert Delaunay would have loved to paint, I felt. A capricious thought, possibly, but one I would not have had without metaphorical "new eyes".

Sonia Delaunay, 1914, Prismes électriques, oil on canvas, (Image courtesy of Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris)

More on identity

Yesterday, I mused about the role of drawing in defining one's identity as an artist. Unlike painting, with its more elaborate statement and stage-like set-up, drawing allows an artist to explore and lay out all sorts of different ideas. There is often more flexibility and honesty shown in a drawing, which reveals the artist more readily.

Daring to draw and reveal an inner core requires an act of trust for the artist. Trust that one's own voice will come through and show the artist to be an individual, with a personal style. Basically a high wire act on many occasions, but worth the effort. The more one draws, the more one learns to trust that eye coordination with hand, the inner voice which dictates which marks to make, what to include, what to omit.

Drawing marathons help too - if you push yourself beyond the limit, as in any other discipline, you discover new strengths, new horizons as an artist. You refine who you are as a draughtsman and, by extension, who you are as an artist.

Photo of New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture - New York, home to Drawing Marathons (Image courtesy of Yelp.com)