The Magic of Figurative Art
I would like to discuss the profound elements that go into fine art, specifically figurative art. At its height it has the ability to integrate and express philosophy, psychology, scientific visual perception, and emotional intelligence.
Canvas as the Universe
A great way to look at figurative art is to assume that the canvas is the universe, and the subject matter shows us humanity's relationship to it. We have all seen child drawings in crayon that have a little girl with a big smile on her face, a house in the background that may be a tree, and then a big starlit sun crudely drawn as stick figures. Yet, it conveys the philosophical message: a happy girl with the safety of home in the sunlit universe. This messaging embedded in art, and in our human species, can quickly show, for instance, a therapist or a teacher, what is going on with a child, even though they may not be able to express it in words.
When this powerful tool of communication is put in the hands of a master artist, it can serve as an evolutionary tool to further human awareness, fine-tune their senses, develop their philosophy, and enhance their emotional intelligence.
Composition: Harmony or Not
One of the most well-known tools is composition. It’s the arrangement of shapes within the parameters of the paper or the canvas. How the artist approaches it tells us whether their universe on the canvas is in harmony, disjointed, balanced, or skewed.
Psychological Depth
Spatial depth in painting literally works in a physiological way of how our eyes perceive depth, but it also serves as a metaphor for psychological depth. While flat paintings superficially scream that they don't give a shit about depth of vision, character, psychology, or if you live or die! Later I discuss the life and death importance of visual perception.
Enlightenment
Light and shadow have the science of visual perception, and it’s interesting that when an artist can convey light, such as an artist like Rembrandt, they enable us to see better.
Visual perception is not literally indiscriminately absorbing light vibrations. It’s how our mind focuses our eyesight on objects and things. When we look at a Rembrandt painting, we can see how shadows and lights and mid-tones are working to create a stunning effect of us feeling the light, as if the light is really in the painting. Yet, through the painting we can also see how the light was created. After spending a lot of time with a Rembrandt, we may notice how a candlelight at the dinner table is casting shadows and pockets of light on our partner's hand, and that we may not have noticed in that precise way before—it inform our perception to see better.
There’s also the metaphor of light and dark and its psychological significance.
It’s interesting that in painting, you can't create light without shadow, and it works vice versa. So, it’s more like light and shadow in painting are similar to life and death. Life would have little meaning without the certainty of death, and our knowledge of death motivates us to live as fully as possible.
The physiology of light in visual perception is fascinating. It's intriguing how an increased amount of light on an object enhances our ability to perceive its intricate details, reaching surprising levels such as noticing individual hairs. Light enables us to see things we never noticed before. Metaphorically, it's a profound reflection – light, both literally and symbolically, enables us to see better, not just in the visual sense, but also in our understanding and appreciation of the world around us.
Life or Death Can Rely on Our Visual Perception
A big part of visual perception is differentiating form and negative space. For instance, we all drive, and our cars are very powerful and can be very dangerous forms if they run into you or you run into someone else. When we’re driving on the freeway, there are spaces where cars can fit, and there are spaces where they’ll just meet up against the other car. So, it’s imperative that our perception gives us a true understanding of what we can detect as form and what is an empty space. Another analogy would be to ski down a hill with pine trees lining the path. Our eyes can tell us that the form of the tree is solid, which would be very dangerous to hit head-on, and that in between the two trees is empty space in which we can ski through. The quality of our visual perception could be a matter of life and death. In my practice as an artist, seeing the form of things grounds me to reality, and part of our psychological health is to be able to see reality for what it is, not as some figment of our imagination or hallucination.
Boundaries
Line serves as a crucial element, helping to clarify the edges between objects. A wonderful metaphor for line is that it creates boundaries, dictating how far an object can go and no further.
No Hidden Agendas
A particularly interesting aspect worth exploring is transparency in painting. Effects from transparency were often accidental, achieved through techniques like glazing. Technically akin to staining a wood table, artists use a thin layer of paint to glaze over a section, allowing the previous work to remain visible through this transparent layer. I have done optical research on the transparency of shadows. When there's a high contrast of light and dark in the background, shadows of the foreground object often adapt to mimic those background objects.
A fascinating metaphor for transparency, especially for human figures, is that they are transparent with no hidden agenda. I made a point of using this device after discovering the clandestine nature of an organization I was associated with! This transparency is creatively employed in my recent space series, adding stunning optics to the artworks.
Color: Ineffable Mood
Color has a wonderful ineffable quality to it as it conveys moods, and certain combinations can give us a profound sense of harmony when the colors are in harmony. But on a more sophisticated level, colors are used to intensify the effects of light and depth. For example, in Monet’s landscape paintings, using warmer colors on the highlights of ice in the snow, and cooler colors as the shadows on the snow create a very special atmosphere, combining color, light, and shadow.
Self-Awareness and Human Consciousness
The figure holds for us a profound sense of our own humanity, and unlike the child’s stick-like figure symbolism, great artists have the ability to convey anatomical knowledge and emotional intelligence through the pose of the figure. We can understand the psychology of a painted figure’s self-awareness by looking into their eyes. It’s a phenomenal ability to make paint able to communicate such sophisticated insight into the human psyche.
Insect, God, or something In Between?
Going back to the canvas as the universe, it’s interesting that the sizes of the objects have significance. For instance, if you have a very, very tiny person that’s let’s say 1/1000th of the size of the landscape, it conveys a message that humanity is tiny, fragile, and insignificant like an insect, and the landscape is the most important aspect of the universe. Whereas, if you take a figure and make it the dominant size in the canvas and center it, you convey a message that humanity is the center of all things and is the most important. For artists, playing with the sizes of the figures in relation to the canvas communicates a huge range of opinion on humanity's role in the universe.
Seeing Truth
Related to this, we have things like perspective, in which all the objects within the canvas are in proportion so that we get a true sense of depth perception by the sizes of the figures. The little figures are often in the distance, several yards away, versus a figure sitting close to us. If the artist distorts the perspective, it conveys a message about humanity not being able to perceive things as they are. While mastery of perspective enables humanity's confidence that indeed they have the ability to see things for what they are.
MKULTRA
One of the definitions of psychosis is that it is a disconnect with reality. Abstract art may use some of the above techniques, but having no content based on our perception of reality becomes a monstrous call to disconnect from reality.1 In essence it becomes a MKULTRA device to destroy the connection of the human mind to reality, rendering the victims prone to manipulation by nefarious actors.
I don't think anyone at the CIA was brilliant enough, in an evil sense to know how postmodern abstract art would serve as a psychological weapon. It's more likely that like programmers intuitively sensed it was a good fit with their weaponizing of psychology.2 3 Yet postmodern abstract art was probably their most successful psychological weapon yet. They released it out in the open with zero blowback, and the victims after buying into will never reexamine their blind support for it. It has nearly brainwashed everyone, to the point that most people feel that art is anything. But more dangerously most people have no idea how to interpret art’s connection to our healthy inner network of emotions, thoughts, and perceptions/senses i.e., our means of evolving. No other era or civilization in the all of humankind had or promoted nihilistic anti-art, they all had differing degrees of real art. From the late 1940s till present the CIA succeeded in the most evil PsyOp in the history of humankind.
Jackson Pollock and Michelangelo Anecdotes:
There are two interesting anecdotes, one involving Jackson Pollock and the other with Michelangelo.
In the Pollock story, he was spending time in a bar with fellow artists, and, at one point, he was banned from the Cedar Tavern for "tearing the bathroom door off its hinges and hurling it across the room at Franz Kline." 4 How fitting that a suicidal alcoholic nihilist was the poster boy for CIA.
In contrast Florence, at the high point of the Renaissance, anticipating a siege from Papal forces Florence choose the artist Michelangelo to be the governor of fortifications.5 6 In a crazy brilliant understanding of psychics Michelangelo saved a bell-tower from bombardment by hanging straw-stuffed leather mattresses in front of its walls.
“In describing the works at S. Miniato, Condivi lays great stress upon Michelangelo's plan for arming the bell-tower. ‘The incessant cannonade of the enemy had broken it in many places, and there was a serious risk that it might come crashing down, to the great injury of the troops within the bastion. He caused a large number of mattresses well stuffed with wool to be brought, and lowered these by night from the summit of the tower down to its foundations, protecting those parts which were exposed to fire. Inasmuch as the cornice projected, the mattresses hung free in the air, at the distance of six cubits from the wall; so that when the missiles of the enemy arrived, they did little or no damage, partly owing to the distance they had travelled, and partly to the resistance offered by this swinging, yielding panoply.’” The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti by John Addington Symonds, February 1, 2004 [eBook #11242]
The Sublime
Figurative art, especially done by masters, uses all its techniques to strengthen, support, and inform our perception of reality. Figurative art at its best has been and will continue to be the high point of 2D visual art, the sublime.7 Where techniques serve as metaphors for philosophy, perception, psychology and might very well be the greatest evolutionary tool of human species.8
I hope that my musing on these philosophical and technical issues of figurative art inspires you to look at paintings as if each one is its own universe. See if you don’t experience the art in a deeper way, or come away with a better understanding of what makes that artist tick and you as the viewer as well.
“Despite poor initial results, CIA-sponsored mind control programmes flourished. On 13 April 1953, the super-secret project MK-ULTRA was born. Its scope was broader than ever before, and only those in the top echelon of the CIA were privy to it. Official CIA documents describe MK-ULTRA as an 'umbrella project' with 149 'sub-projects'. Many of these sub-projects dealt with testing illegal drugs for potential field use. Others dealt with electronics. One explored the possibility of activating 'the human organism by remote control'. Throughout, it remained a major goal to brainwash individuals to become couriers and spies without their knowledge.” https://web.archive.org/web/20060612210310/http://www.angelfire.com/or/mctrl/gall.html
“In the depths of the Cold War’s paranoia and anxiety, there resided a government program enveloped in a cloak of secrecy — Project MKULTRA. A covert operation aiming to explore the darkest possibilities of mind control and human manipulation, MKULTRA has become emblematic of government experiments spiraling far away from ethical and moral boundaries.” https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/cia-mkultra-collection/
This incident is noted in McDarrah, Gloria & Fred's "Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village" (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, p. 25). It's amusingly emblematic of postmodern "Glory Days"! Can’t make this up!
"Florence made a gallant defense; Michelangelo strengthened her walls." This historical event is mentioned in "A Short History of Italy (476-1900)" by Henry Dwight Sedgwick (Release Date: February 22, 2011).
“Michelangelo played a crucial role in the defense of Florence in 1528 when the Papal armies threatened to attack the city. Appointed by the Florentine Republic, he was tasked with fortifying the city's defenses. By 1529, he had designed and overseen the construction of several 'bastions' at strategic points in the existing defensive wall. These defenses proved highly effective, allowing the citizens of Florence to repel superior attacking troops for nearly eleven months until the city fell in 1530, due to an act of political treachery. (Source: Lebbeus Woods, link)
