VISUAL ART IS A PSYOP

A Special Language Embedded Covertly

[This is a chapter from my book, Evolution Through Art.]

PsyOp, psychological operations, is normally a military term about how to covertly manipulate the enemy’s emotions, perceptions, and thoughts, resulting in favorable reactions. A good PsyOp achieves its objectives without the target being aware of the manipulation. Visual art is the original PsyOp, but with a few differences: there is no enemy and the artist achieves this manipulation not as a goal but as a consequence of bringing the artwork into existence. It is the art that transfers the artist’s knowledge affecting the emotions, perceptions and thoughts in the viewer. It is for this reason that art has been called the technology of the soul, and done at its best it triggers an evolutionary state of experience.

This special visual art language shows us a universe of human experience hidden in plain sight. Painters use exclusively visual cues to communicate their emotions, philosophy, and sensations. Not exactly code, not exactly a secret society with mysterious rites, and not exactly telepathy: but it is something like all of these. Ironically it is also blatantly public—every human with eyesight can see clues.

Sensitive and deeply intuitive people can feel visual art language, but the process to create it is exceptionally complicated. Good artists learn it by storing everything they have ever seen—including all the artworks they have experienced. They take this massive amount of visual information and categorize it by mental, emotional, and sensory associations; it is staggering in human scope. This trinity distinguishes art from all other human enterprises. Then the artworks pass on these associations like DNA threads, which become embedded in a receptive audience's integral being, thereby passing on new and sometimes evolutionary connections.

There is a light-hearted spy television series, Chuck, that turns on the premise that vast amounts of knowledge can be embedded through revolutionary technology in the human mind, thereby transforming the recipient. It seems ridiculously far-fetched, yet that is exactly what great art does to you. It is the ultimate in covert activity because people generally are not aware that it has happened to them.

Psychology, Physiology, and the Good Life

How does it work in the visual arts? A representational artist spends thousands of hours acquiring techniques of how to optically reproduce reality, moods, and thoughts. When a human figure is added, due to its complexity, it doubles that time and effort. On the highest levels the techniques are not narrowly limited to a painter's concrete problems. For example, mastering a figure's proportions opens up a host of philosophical, emotional, and optical pathways.

If one thinks of the concept proportion, it leads one towards balance and harmony among things. When applied to life, it becomes a metaphor for balance between work, free time, passion, friendships, love, and family. If that balance is achieved, there is a perfect moment when the puzzle of life is elegantly solved. A Polyclitus sculpture of a perfectly proportioned Olympic winner is not just a portrait but the personification of what the good life looks like.

Another interesting visual technique is spatial depth. By itself it seems straightforward to recreate the three-dimensional reality we all live in. But on a higher artistic level, it communicates psychological depth and a physiological sense of moving through space. The greater the painting's depth, the more the artist pulls you gently into their expanding universe. This technique triggers your eye's optics, and without you being consciously involved your eye senses an opening space and starts to adjust as if it were entering a vast reality. A magic carpet ride through another land and time.

The kicker is when one realizes consciously that the optical trip one just went on is triggered by looking at a flat, two-dimensional surface. Then one double-checks by looking again at this extraordinary painting only to realize one is back flying through open spaces. The combination of being pulled into space and the eye adjusting to different objects through the painting gives off emotive feelings. Add to that a feeling of wonder that a flat surface can be turned into a magic portal.

Can you guess which famous artist creates the greatest spatial depth? He is also famously known for light and the look of empathy in his portraits. Rembrandt van Rijn .

More Real Than Reality

REMBRANDT

Figure 18 Rembrandt, Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

Rembrandt’s portraits, including his self-portraits, convey exceptionally thoughtful, empathetic, and sensitive people. If Rembrandt hadn’t mastered spatial depth in the way he did, the faces would be flat, but his faces are the furthest thing from that—they have substance. A superb example of this can be seen in his Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. Notice the spatial distances between each person in relation to each other. Then notice the depth within each face. The noses and foreheads are true projections, the eyes are set in deep sockets, and the ears are set far back. We can feel the width, length, and depth of each face. The added Rembrandt genius is that each of the figures is placed in a different spatial spot, giving each person his own personal space—a wonderful metaphor for being an individual within a group.

A fascinating study is to compare each person's skin tones and hue saturations. No two sets of colors are identical. You can track the shifts of color across the canvas, cheek by cheek, from one man to the next, from gray to pink to peach—like landmarks in a three-dimensional map. The hue differences are the result of the spatial depth and the directional light. The closer the faces are to us, and the more they are in the light, the more saturated the colors and the more range in tonal contrast. I don't know which comes first: that Rembrandt wanted to create empathetic faces and developed spatial depth and light, or that those skills led to his ability to show the human spirit. 

So far I have discussed only some technical elements, but what are these men thinking? They look earnest, each one looks focused; there is no furrowed brow and no angst about the close proximity to a split cadaver. Well, the man on the far left looks like the color has drained from his face. Could that be Rembrandt humor? These men are middle-aged scholars/doctors, but still curious. They still have something to learn. They are not ivory-tower intellectuals, but hands-on. What could be a morbid painting turns into a study of these doctors' characters.

This complex masterpiece was painted in the early golden age of the Netherlands, which was preeminent in northern Europe for science, trade, industry, and art. Was this painting projecting the human qualities that are needed for a flourishing culture?

Once in a museum I studied how a Rembrandt painting held its visual integrity at a distance before it blurred out. Lesser paintings lose their quality as the viewer gets further away. This museum had three very large rooms with open entrances. They had placed a Rembrandt at the furthest end, visible through all the doorways. I went to the end of the third room to look at the painting, standing, I guess, over 300 feet from it. The Rembrandt portrait was clearly visible. Ironically it was almost impossible to distinguish the facial features of the real people that far away. Rembrandt's ability to expand the distance between a face's landmarks made his portrait visibly more real than the real people in the room.

Subtle Gestures

A psychological skill that good figurative artists use is imbuing figures with emotion through gestures. They go beyond technical observations and find poses that “say” something. They will observe thousands of poses searching for the trigger that fits their concept of the painting.

Figure 19 Édouard Manet, The Balcony, detail, circa 1869, oil on canvas, 67 x 49", Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

MANET

Édouard Manet, the great 19th-century painter of Olympia, created intricate and sometimes multi-figure compositions. Within his painted universe he would often guide the focus to a particular feature, such as the understated hand gestures. An elegant example of this is his painting The Balcony. It is a group of three well-dressed people (and a fourth person, in the far distant dim) who are on a balcony facing the outside world. Each of them is looking in a different direction and has an introspective look in their eyes. They don't look like participants, but more like voyeurs. Earlier I mentioned how time stops when humans take a moment to just look and ponder; these people are doing that.

In life we rarely get to stare at people for long periods of time; it invades people's sense of their private space. But looking at a painting we can stare as long as we like. We can closely observe everything about them. This is one of the profound elements of art: the ability to study human behavior/stances from a safe place. Sometimes it shifts our vantage point. If we are looking at a nude, it might be from the perspective of a lover. In the case of this painting, it seems as if we are looking at these three figures from a psychoanalyst's perspective.

Their faces and postures are not giving us a lot to go on, their mouths are in a neutral natural state. The man is standing straight and leaning slightly back, the woman on the right is standing indifferently, and the woman sitting is leaning forward, her shoulders tilted. But their hands are expressing things that their faces do not.

The man's right hand is closed as if he is holding a coin while his left hand has a sensual quality to it. His fingers are curved in a rhythmic way. It reminds me a little of the gesture of rubbing the thumb with the forefingers to rub herbs to unleash their aromas. The seated woman's hands also have rhythmic quality. The fingers on her left hand are gently laid as if feeling the contours of her passive right hand. Her little finger is elegantly curved in an unconscious way. There is no tension in her hands, rather there is an element of self-care.

The kid-gloved hands of the standing woman, who looks wistful, are surprisingly animated. Her hands are the focal point of the painting. It is worth spending time observing them. It is as if they are having a conversation while preening like a flamboyance of flamingos at a social gathering, each one having a point to make. The pose of her hands is feminine, and though expressive it is non-aggressive and graceful. It is a stunning contrast with her forlorn glance and frumpish body. Of the three people she is the sleeper; prod her, and you wake a richly expressive woman with insights and passion.

Like her, Manet is a marvel of ardor behind an understated exterior. As we continue to look more at the painting, there is an alarming symbolic subtext. Notice the two women are cradling the phallic shapes—one with the fan, the other a closed umbrella, both tilted upwards on a forty-five degree angle. Now the man holding the nub of a lit cigarette takes another meaning. In visual art a cigar is never just a cigar. Who would have thought there was so much intrigue in the inner lives of these people?

Taking a Stance

When I lived in Rhodes, Greece, I met an Italian architect. He was expressive, creative, and had a tremendous joy of life. He often expressed himself with hand gestures, like a lot of Italians do, but I kept having a déjà vu moment watching him, until I saw a photo of him with a hand movement that I recognized from art. It was like one of the hand gestures from a figure from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. The gesture was passionate, proactive, non-aggressive, and very sensual by the turn of the hand and the placement of the fingers. It was as if a part of him were channeling the spirit of Michelangelo.

There is an interesting physiological phenomenon in which changing your stance changes your mood. Standing holding your head up and smiling makes it hard to feel sad at that moment, conversely, sitting like a folded chair heaped against a wall with your head down between your knees makes it hard to feel uplifting thoughts. An extraordinarily talented artist uses a range of poses to get the viewer to feel certain types of emotions. Using these devices and more, a figurative artist can express a huge amount of experience in a solitary stance or gesture.

The effect on a viewer can be particularly special, in a way it could set the course of their life. Sometimes the stance in an artwork can resonate so profoundly with a viewer that when they recall the personal meaning of the stance it can remind them of the attitude in which they want to live and what to live for. Two justly outstanding works that are famous for their stances towards life are Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People and Michelangelo's David. I will discuss the David in the next chapter.

Give Me Liberty

DELACROIX

Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People is a painting of life and death struggle—perfectly representing the concept of Patrick Henry’s 1775 exclamation: “Give me liberty, or give me death!” Delacroix shows us a heroine in action lunging over a barricade followed by a ragged mass of fighters. At her side is a young teenager. They all have weapons and are charging ahead where people have already died. Her arm is uplifted carrying the French revolutionary tri-colored flag of 1830. She has the physicality of a world-class tennis player, her blouse has shifted during the chaos revealing her breasts. In this context they are not alluring, rather they represent a symbol of nurturing the birth of a new nation.

Figure 20 Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830,
oil on canvas, 102 x 128", Louvre, Paris.

This is a work of gravitas. Delacroix was a contemporary of this revolution in time and place. Liberty doesn’t have any of the coquettishness of a femme fatale, rather she is a preeminent leader. In this composition, Delacroix placed her apart at the highest point in the canvas, we recall the Gebel el-Arak Knife in which the king/priest was the same height as the pair of lions. But her elevated position is not shared, she reached this height on her own—symbolically conveying the importance of individualism spearheading cultural change. In the context of the painting, it is clear that she is not lording it over anyone, but there rather to inspire them, hoping that her certainty in the cause will allay their fears, imbue them with fearlessness, and tip the scale.

In perspective, Liberty is the largest figure in the painting. Delacroix used it to bring out her importance, but like with the above techniques, he used perspective to highlight that she was the catalyst—the driving force. Delacroix used the medieval painters’ device of making Jesus or God the largest and most important symbolic figure. But medieval painters knew little about perspective, their paintings have a slightly absurd feeling, the sizes of the people and things do not correspond to reality. This is an important difference, because the disconnect between medieval art and perspective broke with reality, sending the message that the painting's meaning wasn't about real life. Delacroix rethought the insanely complex perspective problem to convey the hierarchy of sizes and importance, yet integrated them with true perspective. For Delacroix heroism is meant to be real.

“Newberry launches an unapologetic masterpiece of PsyOp targeted at art and its history.” -Boone Cutler

Boone Cutler’s journey from a combat veteran serving in Iraq to an influential advocate for the Warfighter community and fellow Americans is deeply intertwined with his literary works. In the heart of Sadr City Boone served as a Psychological Operations team sergeant. - About Boone Cutler

Boone Cutler is author of several books including the The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare series, co-authored by General Michael Flynn.

Note: I was inspired to share this chapter because of a Facebook post by The Starfire Codes by Demi Pietchell