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Art Briefings

Tricks of the (art) Trade

All my life I have admired people who can make marks on paper that capture your imagination in some way. That has widened to include other forms of design, like furniture, pottery, sculpture, fabric design, even knitting. I’ve never stopped trying to do that.

All these activities mean acquiring skills but also learning what are essentially tricks. I’ve often told people about my dad saying ‘let the saw do the work’ and it taking me another 20 years to realise what he meant (don’t over work it, establish a smooth rhythm). If you know the trick, then the skill often becomes easier to achieve. About 45 years after my dad first said that, someone watching me make stage sets remarked on the sheer speed of my sawing and I gave a little inward smile.

Last week I mentioned to Shelley Art Group the old watercolour sky trick. Skies often have deeper colour at the top of your view than at the bottom. If you are using watercolour the liquid tends to run downwards, taking the pigment with it. If you are painting on the flat, then it tends to run to edges of the area you are painting. If you are painting a sky, then turning the paper upside down makes the pigment run to the top of the sky. which is usually what you want. If it is a blue sky with white clouds you can dab the clouds out using an edge of cloth or tissue.

Knowing the trick doesn’t guarantee a result but it usually means that you are not working against the materials. This in turn allows you to concentrate on developing the skills to make the best use of that trick. As with my sawing, you suddenly develop more freedom and control in what you are doing. In watercolour that often means that you can use wetter applications of paint that flow.

In one group of people I painted with, one of them had been an art teacher and went to the Slade Art School. I watched him working on a scene with figures. This is a hard thing to do. He did the background and then sketched the figures on separate pieces of paper and cut them out. He moved them about the painting till he was satisfied, changing figure size if necessary, then marked them in place and set to painting. I’ve never forgotten that trick and I now use it in digital sketches for painted works. The painting at the top of this piece is one I was asked to do, of a kestrel sculpture I made that is down in Bristol. I had a couple of photos and I played with layouts, using a mixture of bits cut from photos, that I moved about and changed the angles of in Art Rage, and digital paint for the sky. When I was happy with it, I painted the sky first, using a mixture of palette knife and brush, then added the house roofs (palette knife). Finally I cut out the kestrel, moved it about, changed size and shape slightly then marked it in place and painted it on. I moved the rod, that holds it up and allows it to be seen from different angles as well as possible, so that it was there but worked best with this painting angle.

One of the simplest tricks people often forget about is to keep standing back to look at what you are doing from further away. Find some way of standing it up and look from the other side of the room. Do it often. If you are making a sculptural object, put it somewhere that you can walk round it and peer at it from different angles. You don’t have to develop a skill for this one, just remember the trick. If you are working digitally keep zooming out to get the same effect.

So there you are your trick starters.

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Briefings

Notes for a SAG Digital Art Briefing

I’m Steve and I’ve been trying to make art/craft in all forms since I was little. Alongside various sport, it has been a constant in a much changing life. I have painted, drawn, used most printing techniques, sculpted, made posters, drawn cartoons, made furniture, designed made and painted stage sets, painted murals, landscaped gardens, made animated images and who knows what else. I keep trying and sometimes I am more pleased than others with what I’ve produced by the time I get to the point where I am just going to make it worse.

Alongside that I have also been involved with computers since the 1960’s. I have always been the person who can be given the most technical problem to solve but I was very pleased when someone said of me that I was also the person who could talk to any person at any level of an organisation and explain how things worked and how to use them best.

When home computers came along, I bought one to explore and to get my children used to them. I wrote and amended graphic computer games for them. Being a cruel person, I made them do arithmetic tests scaled to their age to get into the games. All the neighbourhood kids came round.

In 2003/4 Wayne and I went to New Zealand and walked the Milford Track. Each day I walked of ahead and then picked a spot and sat and sketched. People came along and looked at what I’d done and chatted. I’d been playing with my own website for years and after the walk I put all the sketches up there and everyone, from all over the world, who’d done the walk knew where they were and could look at them and remember the spots.

About 10 years ago Ruth bought me a Microsoft Surface, which is an iPad rival. I experimented with it but realised that other tools were often better suited to what I wanted to do. I did take it along to my eldest daughter’s birthday party to play with and ended up surrounded by kids and I gave each of them a new painting to work on in turn. Afterwards I put them all up on Facebook and they were shared around all over again. This year I put a new web page on my current website called The Fridge Door and I put those party images up there alongside all the images of kids’ art I had collected over the years. Cue a lot of sharing and relatives and friends being entertained once again.

Using computers I have put images on T-shirts, sent images to other parts of the world, put scenes on table and cup mats, sketched out designs, helped people get messages across by simplifying them into cartoon like images.

Today’s session should help you further along your journey to explore what a computer and a few apps cane do to add to your creative fun.

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Briefings

Fast Solving, Slow Checking

I’ve been interested in the way brains work all through my life and I’ve written elsewhere about how our eternal vanity has led us to underestimate the brains of other animals. Watching our inevitable rush to put AI everywhere and recently driving a car with elements of steering control has brought back to mind some conclusions I reached many years ago, when researching elements of AI.

This briefing is intended to bring some clarity to this area in the vain hope that it might slow the inevitable rush to implement without understanding the implications. There is a general overview of AI in another briefing.

As far as we can tell there are two groups of thinking processes in our brains. One group is what Daniel Kahneman characterises as the fast thinking group and is almost certainly the earlier group to have developed to enable us to survive. It works amazingly quickly and accurately in most situations but has known failings, especially in the areas of probability and risk assessment. As far as I can tell we still have little knowledge of how it actually works.

The other group of thinking processes is related to logic and reasoning. This is much slower and more tiring. People generally overestimate the amount of this sort of thinking they do and social systems have a bias in that direction too. The big advantage of this set of thinking systems is that they often allow us to keep an eye on the the other set. The two working together are probably what has allowed us to become such a dominant species. This sort of thinking is also what has allowed us to develop things like maths, logic and scientific analysis to allow us to develop things like automation and computerisation.

At some point we realised that some problems we were trying to solve were so complex that plain logic was not enough and we had to adopt more complex processes involving estimation and statistical prediction, as used in Quantum Physics. AI does some stunning things combining such processes with computing’s astonishing speeds.

Unfortunately, as AI has got better at mimicking our fast instinctive brains, it has often been done with insufficient attention to the checking and auditing side of our brain processes. People have always produced computer systems with insufficient attention to detail and practicality, but when there is a particular place on a narrow bridge where your car tries to steer you into the side of the bridge because of a white line nearer than it deems sensible, then things have got very silly. Currently AI is full of such bad pieces of design.

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Art Briefings

Art and Vision

Thornhil, Dewsbury

When people are taught to paint landscapes, they will often be told to make things further away tend towards lighter and bluer. Unfortunately sometimes people tend see this as a rule, rather than a painting trick to emulate the effects of distance and atmosphere on colour saturation. There are lots of similar guidelines that can become a hindrance if taken too literally.

If you read about the painter John Constable, you will almost certainly come across the tale of him and Joshua Reynolds, where constable puts a violin on the grass to demonstrate that they are not the same colour, after Reynolds objected to the colours in Constable’s paintings.

When photography came along it changed the way we see things and motion photography even allowed us to see how things actually move for the first time. At the same time photography took away visual art’s dominant role in capturing a likeness for posterity. This in turn allowed artists to investigate other roles for their art. Increasing awareness of science, particularly relating to colour and vision, also gave artists new ideas about how to do their job. There have been many debates in art history about how to do things and some of these relate to vision and how we see and remember the world around us.

Nether Wasdale View

If you ever stand in front of a wide open landscape and enjoy looking at it, a temptation is to take a photograph. I’d be pretty surprised if you weren’t often disappointed with the result. All the magnificent detail and sweep of light you see will have been largely lost. Even a sophisticated camera has limitations of focus, whereas we can focus near and far repeatedly and rapidly without really noticing that we are doing it. Most of the time it doesn’t even make us dizzy. The vision we have in our head is then a combination of what we have seen and felt, with special emphasis on all the things we have been most interested in.

Farms above the Colne Valley, Slaithwaite

The next element of perception that is important to highlight separately is memory. While our memories are unreliable, they are still ours. We are capable of holding a lot of detail about a scene, as well as host of related generalisations and also feelings. I know of painters who repeat the same scene repeatedly from memory. Each version is different but also alike. Whether intensionally or not, each painting will often be recognisably by the same person.

View Down the Cone Valley, Linthwaite

That last bit about repeating a scene painting also relates to our ability to produce and recognise schematics of things. Every child does it very quickly in their development and even animals are able to do it. Those Captcha tests that have popped up over the last few years, designed to demonstrate your humanity, would be within the capability of a pigeon or crow, as long as they had been taught to associate the schematic with food.

In the pencil sketch below the are no colour hints about what we are seeing and little difference in tone between near and far. In fact the mast at Emley Moor has more definition than it might have in a photograph, representing what we would see by changing our focus temporarily. Within the picture there are plenty of hints about scale and perspective from the lines and objects. The effect is strong enough for us to recognise that the field in the distance is just a different shape, rather than badly drawn.

View across the Valley
Battyeford View

So if you do want to paint a scene, reasonably realistically, for someone, based on a photograph, don’t be afraid to paint it as they might see or remember it. Equally don’t be afraid to represent what you want to represent without being a slave to the myth of realism.

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Art Briefings

Why Art, What Art

In one way or another, I’ve been studying and doing art and craft for more than sixty years. I’ve also been involved with performance of various kinds, crossing art boundaries. For more than a decade I’ve taken people round the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, on the historic West Bretton Estate and talked to every sort of person, from different parts of the world, about art and history. One of the things I stress to people about YSP is that the park itself is a giant sculpture.

Talking to people has made some things particularly clear to me and below are some key points I have learned.

Art is both subconscious and conscious. Most animals, including us, seem to have a sense of shape and form and also sound. Some of us animals use those senses for display and communication purposes. This means that art can have multiple levels of appeal.

Because art has been around as long as we have it is plain that it is important to us in some way.

Art has never had one particular way of doing things, though there have been plenty of attempts to enforce a particular way.

The separation of art from craft is not really helpful.

Even the best artists never fully achieve what they want, let alone satisfy all the people all the time.

Human competitiveness means that arts are often used to show off and to demonstrate superiority and thus other people’s inferiority. You should never let that last tendency put you off trying out your artistic skills, if you, and even someone else, might get enjoyment from the attempt.

Some people can just control themselves better and practice doesn’t make perfect in such complicated skills. Equally, even with control and practice people can still produce neat, colourful but not very interesting art.

We all borrow ideas from others. It can’t be helped. Children’s art is already full of borrowed ideas and styles but can still have a personal impact without complicated skills. We all have to make a compromise to achieve whatever we want to achieve.

Art can look like something but it doesn’t have to copy that thing completely.

Art can be abstract but that doesn’t mean it can’t also represent something or some idea or emotion.

When you produce any form of art you are representing a subject, an idea. On top of that, what you produce is influenced by all the things and people you have encountered. Those two things should influence the tools you use to produce the art and those tools should influence the art itself.

Art doesn’t have to be pretty. All forms of art can be used to highlight unpleasant things. There are all sorts of messages in art and the art reflects that.

If your art has a particularly strong emphasis on message then it is of little use if only a small number of the already converted pick that message up.

The, never displayed, work above was called ‘Modern Gods and Heroes’. It is a visual rant about cars, overcrowding, shallow celebrity and eco-failure from around forty years ago. The fact that I’m explaining it speaks of its relative failure. That doesn’t mean that art shouldn’t have a title or explanation.

You are right to question the value of art and the need for public funding but think of all the other things that command higher prices than they perhaps deserve.

Keep looking, thinking, enjoying and trying.

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Briefings

The Story of Opposable Thumbs

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I had an accident when I was young that means that I am more aware than many how useful our hands are and what a nuisance it is when you can’t use them properly. I can’t easily use my right hand to pick up or hold things and often use my left to manoeuvre things into place. I have joked that I am half Primate and half not.

The story of opposable thumbs is often one part of how we explain to ourselves how clever we are. I referred to this habit in another post on Anthropomorphism.

I have recently been taking enlarged videos of the birds in our garden, so I have been looking at them more closely than usual. Birds, as you probably know, are basically evolved dinosaurs and, because of their size, only have little brains. Like with the poor Goldfish, people use terms like ‘bird brain’ as insults. In fact birds can see things that are completely invisible to us, have amazing ability to respond to visual signals with physical action at great speed and pigeons can recognise drawings and photos of trees as trees. Birds have also been shown to recognise themselves in a mirror.

So how do birds relate to opposable thumbs? Well some birds have one of the toe/fingers on each foot facing backwards. This gives them advantages in all sorts of situations related to there particular lifestyle, so we are not alone in that ability. In fact there are several species of animals that have similar adaptations.

Whilst I was staring at my hand thinking about this, I realised that the thumb is not the main problem. It is the fact that I can’t control the fingers either. On my left I can touch any one finger to any other. On my right I can’t do that and the only way I can reliably get fingers to touch their neighbour is by curling the hand up so all four touch. Relating that to watching the birds in the garden, I have watched them pick up a seed, place it between their toes, that are also holding the perch and then use their beak and tongue to remove bits of husk and eat the seed inside. I am just jealous, of the dextrous toes, the very useful beak and the ability to bend that way.

So before calling someone a bird brain (you shouldn’t be so insulting anyway), think of trying to make a birds nest. Look at one and think of the dexterity and skill needed to make it. In many ways it is likely that we have flourished because of our inabilities, that have made us have to find other ways of doing things.

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Briefings

Your Time or Mine?

I’ve been reading a book where there is much extended and slightly repetitive musing about our experience of Time. Partly because Ruth is currently in a time zone that is thirteen hours ahead of me, I had a think about it. Without getting too technical, I thought I’d put down some thoughts that might clarify for us.

First, we all experience time differently. Usually I seem to do things faster than many people. It doesn’t feel like that when I am doing something but that is often what happens. When I was a student and I was in a lecture where there were copious notes written on the board the opposite would happen. Because I am left handed, I have always written slowly, so I would constantly be trying to catch up and shaking my hand because it hurt. My experience of time varies for me and it differs from everyone else’s. We are all like that.

Second, our experience of time is different to our attempts to measure it. Measurement, naming, the making of formulae to make predictions are all things that scientists and makers use to add levels of control to our lives. Relating this to time, one unit of measurement we use is the Day. This makes sense, though if you live at the poles it is somewhat less useful. The poles are not only difference though. I live at the top of a hill. For me the sun comes up earlier and goes down later than those who live in the valley below me, so their experience is slightly different. In a hot air balloon hovering above me the difference would be even more marked. A wide open plane changes things again.

Having instinctively chosen the day as a time measure we went on to make up all sorts of different measurement units, partly to give us more understanding and control but also to help with communication. Sadly bad communication often happens when people start dreaming or arguing about those units of measurement.

The more people travelled and the more travel speeded up the more important it seemed to unify measurements a bit. Here we come to the International Date Line. This is the arbitrary point at which one day changes to the next. This is where Ruth being thirteen hours ahead comes in. The date line runs down the pacific and wobbles round the few countries it meets, because there are few countries to meet and thus only sparse populations to upset. It is useful, but is the clearest illustration between the experience of time and the measurement of it. When you add in the fact that New Zealand and the UK both change the clocks twice a year and at slightly different times of year, so that there can be 11,12 or 13 hours between us, the wobbliness of the measurement factor is highlighted.

It is also important to realise that it is still Now wherever you are. When I chat to new Zealand we are still chatting at the same time (apart from slight delays for transmission) even though the time of day is different, as is the season, the weather and whatever other experiences surround our chat.

So whether is day, minutes, years, light years, parsecs or any other measure, they are all just measures. Our experience is different to the measuring. In a similar vane, if someone tells you that a table is not actually solid, just smile wisely and say ‘Actually it is solid and thank goodness for all the random, unpredictable behaviours of those sub atomic particles that make it solid to, solid tomorrow and onwards until something changes it.

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Briefings

Skill without Purpose

I was around 7 or 8 when a teacher showed us how to make a version of an origami dragon head. It has just occurred to me that I did pretty well to make it, as just over a year before I had an accident that has meant that I can’t use my right hand properly. That aside, origami has been with me since and the most frequently made piece has been the water bomb in the picture. Something appeals about a piece of flat folding that you then blow into and make swell.

Another trick I learned at some point in my life was to raise my arm up, bent at the elbow, so that the palm of my hand was facing upwards just behind the line of my ear. I would then balance a pile of coins on the elbow, fling my arm forward and catch all the coins in my hand. Pretty impressive eh? Actually, like most things, all that is involved is a little natural ability, understanding some ‘tricks’, and some practice.

It is tempting to say that these skills have no value whatsoever but I have entertained people (especially very young people) with them a lot. Also I have seen origami used to demonstrate all sorts of things, such as teamwork, production planning and other business practices. In one such session I noticed that someone who was not naturally skilled at the folding still provided an insight that the more speedy of us could use to get even faster. I have even managed to get a large group of flighty drama students to sit quietly working in groups of four to produce origami swans for a performance piece.

Still, when it comes down to it, these skills are still not that useful. Which brings me to the real point of this. Sadly much human reasoning, and the education practices that support it, are bit like origami. It is a set of skills that can be used in a useful way, but can also be used without real purpose and even quite destructively. One example is what I call Angels on the Head of a Pin reasoning. I don’t know if people have actually debated how many angels you can get on a the head of a pin but a lot of intellectual debate has ben underpinned by such questionable starting points. I would argue that the origami also has more value than much of that debate.

I hope that makes sense.

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Briefings

Bring on the Zoomorphism

There is a strong tendency in science to disapprove of anthropomorphism, meaning attributing human characteristics to animals. There is good reasoning behind that, but I suspect there is also a great deal of species snobbery involved as well.

It is true that we can’t tell what is going on in animals minds. Sadly that is also true of other people’s minds. With other humans we do have more clues because of shared experiences and the use of language but all sorts of things interfere with the reliability of the inferences that we make from what we observe and what people tell us. Modern technology, such as brain scans, can help in the rigour of our studies, but our understanding is still very fragmentary.

So why do I think the ‘avoid anthropomorphism’ stricture is also snobbish. Well we have a history of believing that we are totally unique and superior. It is even built into many religions. Many more people than now also used to think that women and children were also on some lower level and that reasoning about their behaviour was difficult. Most of us have moved on from that.

Avoiding comparing animals with humans risks missing out on vital clues about behaviours. If an animal looks embarrassed, then it is possible that they are experiencing something similar to our own reactions in a comparable situation. After all a very significant proportion of our own daily behaviour is controlled at a sub-rational level. To assume that animals can’t be reacting like us is just vanity.

Elsewhere I have said that I think that animals have some form of ‘artistic’ impulse. That is a two way assumption: that, in some way, the animal is thinking about what they are making or doing in terms of what it looks like but also that when we make or do things we are operating with impulses that are not entirely unique to us. That is zoomorphism.

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Briefings

Language, Trade and History

I am just reading ‘Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It.’ by Janina Ramirez. Coincidently I am also watching ‘Art that Made Us’ and also ‘Nature and Us: a History Through Art’ on BBC iplayer. All these cover some similar ground, weaving their own story around similar times, people, place and objects.

It is important to remember that all history stories are selective, interpretive and sometimes even polemical. Also that the writers operate within the realm of their own knowledge, beliefs and the paradigms they have inherited from others. In addition they have to operate with the evidence available and this can vary considerably and sometimes speculation is the only real option. It is important that we recognise that speculation and also look for the questions that are not being asked.

In the above histories some time is spent looking at the different tribes and peoples moving through the landscape of the British Isles from the arrival of the Romans to the end of, say, Elizabeth 1’s reign. There are Picts, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and more, all coming into and going out of different parts of the islands, fighting, raiding, settling, mating but also, very importantly, trading. Nobody knows exactly what happened or all the movements from one place to another.

As I was taking all this in, I started to think about language and went off on a trail looking at Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Anglo Saxon English, Norse, Latin, French. When you add in barely mutually understandable dialects, you realise that all of these and more were co-existing and influencing people’s behaviour and interactions. When you listen to the history stories there is a tendency for them to assume that Latin and French, for instance are being used by the ‘educated’ few, or that the fact that Welsh now exists mainly in Wales means that all the Welsh speakers were driven out of England when other groups came in. While this drift is true, it hides a more complicated day-to-day situation. At any one time many people would just have stayed where they were and adapted to the changed circumstances.

One of the glues in this complicated situation is trade. Among the objects found in archaeological digs in these islands are elements that come from all over the then known world. Between their origin and their final resting place there is a continuous chain of more ordinary people exchanging goods, passing on manufacturing techniques, discussing and copying designs and haggling over prices.

These exchanges are not carried out exclusively in mime. Bits of all sorts of languages would be used, drawings might be scribbled on archaeologically useless scraps of whatever was to hand, and different coinages would be assessed and traded. This doesn’t just happen at trading centres, but between ordinary individuals across disputed territories, who are just getting on with their daily lives.

There is no one standard English language to day and there never has been, but we all manage to communicate more or less successfully. When I was young there were no regional accents on radio or TV, so it was often harder for some to understand some others. The irony of the current fusion of accents is that local differences are rapidly disappearing. When I visited family in Cumbria, I would hear broad dialect/accent that I rarely hear today. At the same time, if I watch a Norwegian program with subtitles, I can still hear some of those dialect words used in Norway. Similarly, when I was young a lot of my friends were Jewish. At school they talked the same as me, but at home they would often be surrounded by Yiddish, Hebrew and quite likely at least one other European language. I still have random Yiddish words floating about in my brain. Similarly there were Muslim families who were regularly using at least three languages at home. All people and living languages have always been, and still are, complicated mixes.

I mentioned mating somewhere in there and this clearly has an effect on how people interacted in history, but I think we’ll leave that for another post.