I am very fascinated by this because it parallels my own theme of perceiving the world anew, as one might by turning upside-down glasses over to see clearly. That is not a 100% correlation to what you are saying, but the spirit is similar. My focus has been on a contemplative Christian perspective in a post-Christian, post-Modern world. My objective is the same as that which you describe as "deep looking." I know you will bonk me over the head for saying this, but, "I can't draw." However, I can think. At the moment, thinking in the form of descriptive phenomenology is my way of drawing on and attempting "deep looking." Thank you for sharing your perspective. We need it very much.
It’s a funny thing that you mention upsidedown glasses. One of the “tricks” to learning observational drawing is to do various things to throw your mental interpretive function off. You’re trying to learn how to just see the thing, not try to interpret what it is or is used for or how it “ought to” look. So one thing is to turn the drawing upside-down and look at it through a mirror. You also “squint” to blur it out, to teach yourself to draw only the values (darks and lights, shadows and highlights). Ruskin called it drawing by the “naive eye,” re-learning to see things as only shapes and angles, clusters of colour, lights and darks, instead of a chair, a cat, a foot, a bridge. It’s a matter of developing the skill of turning off the mental interpretive function at will. But of course, your interpretive ability - how you process visual data into knowledge of the world - is learned in infancy, and most people don’t even realise they are doing it. So, because they know a chair is supposed to have four legs, they always draw a chair with four legs, even if the fourth leg can’t be seen from their angle, so it looks wrong, and they become frustrated. The first step in teaching someone to draw is teaching them about their mind’s interpretive function, that they have it, and have to turn it off.
This is just fascinating. You are describing the phenomenological method precisely from an artist's perspective. Your method is the same I learned from studying Edith Stein and then the other phenomenologists who influenced her (Husserl, Heidegger). The objective is the same, or at least related: "to better see what we have already seen" in the words of David Detmer. It is about bracketing our ideological paradigms to look anew at the world that we might understand what the world is trying to give us - rather than defining everything through the lens of our ideology. I look forward to learning more!
There's way more to this, though, isn't there? Why is it that abstracting reality into seemingly disconnected elements is, what, cathartic? Is it that the perception of the world beginning at infancy is exactly and merely that - perception - and the process of recognizing it anew by abstraction is to acknowledge that at best, we merely "perceive"; thus humbling us and helping to teach us our place in the Order of Creation, and preparing us to learn from The Creator?
Excellent post. Thank you!
How does the classical approach compare to Ruskin’s?
I am very fascinated by this because it parallels my own theme of perceiving the world anew, as one might by turning upside-down glasses over to see clearly. That is not a 100% correlation to what you are saying, but the spirit is similar. My focus has been on a contemplative Christian perspective in a post-Christian, post-Modern world. My objective is the same as that which you describe as "deep looking." I know you will bonk me over the head for saying this, but, "I can't draw." However, I can think. At the moment, thinking in the form of descriptive phenomenology is my way of drawing on and attempting "deep looking." Thank you for sharing your perspective. We need it very much.
It’s a funny thing that you mention upsidedown glasses. One of the “tricks” to learning observational drawing is to do various things to throw your mental interpretive function off. You’re trying to learn how to just see the thing, not try to interpret what it is or is used for or how it “ought to” look. So one thing is to turn the drawing upside-down and look at it through a mirror. You also “squint” to blur it out, to teach yourself to draw only the values (darks and lights, shadows and highlights). Ruskin called it drawing by the “naive eye,” re-learning to see things as only shapes and angles, clusters of colour, lights and darks, instead of a chair, a cat, a foot, a bridge. It’s a matter of developing the skill of turning off the mental interpretive function at will. But of course, your interpretive ability - how you process visual data into knowledge of the world - is learned in infancy, and most people don’t even realise they are doing it. So, because they know a chair is supposed to have four legs, they always draw a chair with four legs, even if the fourth leg can’t be seen from their angle, so it looks wrong, and they become frustrated. The first step in teaching someone to draw is teaching them about their mind’s interpretive function, that they have it, and have to turn it off.
This is just fascinating. You are describing the phenomenological method precisely from an artist's perspective. Your method is the same I learned from studying Edith Stein and then the other phenomenologists who influenced her (Husserl, Heidegger). The objective is the same, or at least related: "to better see what we have already seen" in the words of David Detmer. It is about bracketing our ideological paradigms to look anew at the world that we might understand what the world is trying to give us - rather than defining everything through the lens of our ideology. I look forward to learning more!
There's way more to this, though, isn't there? Why is it that abstracting reality into seemingly disconnected elements is, what, cathartic? Is it that the perception of the world beginning at infancy is exactly and merely that - perception - and the process of recognizing it anew by abstraction is to acknowledge that at best, we merely "perceive"; thus humbling us and helping to teach us our place in the Order of Creation, and preparing us to learn from The Creator?
The only way to answer those questions is to have a go yourself.
This is beautiful. Thank you