VPA101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Phaidon Press, Verisimilitude, Sfumato

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Topic 2 - Illusion
Illusions in Visual Images:
Can take the form of:
Suggestions (incomplete)
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Complete (realism)
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Ambiguous readings (dual readings)
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Movement or distance.
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Illusion is the mind running ahead of the facts and expecting it to be continuous.
Art is about a code, we have to break that code. An illusion is always a suggestion of
more than what's there. Averse militude- Convincingly similar
Da-Vinci, 'Lets work towards incompletion, leave it as a suggestion'.
Ambiguity:
Ambiguity or "dual readings", where an image can have two different surroundings
depending on what is seen first… or a hidden image that slowly reveals itself.
"Illusion in art refers to not only optical illusions, but devices that have become
convention for depicting time, movement, or distance on a two dimension surface.
This topic examines those devices in art history used to convey non-static elements;
some that remain, and ones now outmoded as conventions.
Ambiguity, incompletion, suggestion and realism are all aspects of illusion in art.
The ETC Principal
The 'ETC' principal- the assumption that to see a few members of a series is to see
them all. When we look at the trees in constables 'Wivenhoe park' we take those
farther back on trust because those near us are so convincingly articulated.
E.H Combrich, Art and Illusion, conditions of illusion, Phaidon press, 1956, pp- 184-5
Etcetera means "and so on, and so on, the same" visually, we expect a series of like
images to continue on the same.
It depends on the foreground images being convincingly enough in their realism to
make us assume the ones further back continue on the same, even though they
may be far less detailed.
The expression/impression of movement, and thereby of life, is so much more
easily obtained with a few energetic strokes than through elaboration of detail.
"Once a projection, a reading, finds anchorage in the image in front of us, it
becomes much more difficult to detach it."
"It is the power of expectation rather than the power of conceptual knowledge that
moulds what we see in life no less than in art."
What is meant by these words?
VersinsinitudeA)
trompe l'oellB)
sfumatoC)
Sfumato
Sfumato or Leonardo de Vinci is "The deliberately blurred image' or 'the veiled
form'" which intends to stir responses in the viewer, it is used as an illusion in
painting to suggest rather than delineate. "In his "blurred forms"- he cuts down the
information on, the canvas and thereby stimulates the mechanism of projection.
Walls and Bells
You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven colour. If
you have to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these the likeness
of diving landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains,
hills and valleys in great variety, and then again you will see there battles and
strange figures in violent action, expressions of faces and cloths and an infinity of
things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such
walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find
every named word you can imagine.
Realism
One key point made in Schirato and yell is that our idea of 'realism' is not fixed; it
has shifted - representations of realism since before the renaissance have changed
greatly.
Our concepts of 'realism' in visual images are arguably more filmic in their aesthetic
today.
Trompe l'oeil
Trompe l'oeil is painting 'to deceive the eye', or the verisimilitude of attempting the
illusion of total realism in depiction. The surrealist artist of the 1930s did not invent
realism in art, these principals of representation evolved by 1425 in the
renaissance, and earlier, but surrealist, such as Salvidore Dali and Rene Magritte did
develop "sur-real" French for "beyond real" or "more than real") techniques to
make highly unlike suggestion or incompletion, they relied on absolute
verisimilitude.
Verisimilitude - "an exact likeness"
Trompe l'oeil paintings - exact visual illusions of "realism" rely on mutual
reinforcement of illusion and expectation.
Balance
Balance by symmetry and asymmetry.
Level
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Resting
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Calm
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Quiet
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We often perceive balance in many ways, anything that gives us a sense of
imbalance, may disturb and startle viewers.
We need to have a sense of order and balance with colour and contrast.
Balance by position and eye direction.
Our eyes scan art when we were looking at it, trying to debunk any mysteries and
secrets hidden in it.
Every photograph, has an organisation about it.
Lecture 3 (7th March)
Monday, 19 March 2018
7:50 pm
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