“Perceptions are not always, and very likely never, directly related to physical reality” Richard L Gregory

How is it that an arrangement of blobs is immediately recognisable as a pair of characters from a 17th century work of fiction?

Education and acculturation obviously play a part; anyone who had never heard of Don Quixote could not recognise the characters - or even if they knew of them, they might not be aware of Picasso’s acknowledgement of Daumier and a whole heritage of 19th century Illustration of the subject.

But would they see a thin man on a horse and a fat man on a donkey under the sun in a field of windmills? Because the horse is impossible, no sun ever shone like that and the windmills are ciphers, apparently taken from the symbols on a map.

The completion of images to make them recognisable is partly an automatic process. This can be tested quite simply in this illustration:

Close your right eye and focus the left on the square. Move toward and away from the screen until the circle disappears and the line appears continuous.

This process is not cognitive at all – the line will be continuous even when we know it is not, even when we understand the nature of the blind spot at the back of the eye  and know that our brain is ‘filling in’ it is simply not possible to stop it happening by an act of will.

Why is this so? My own view is that, with stone-age brains, living in an information age society, we are programmed by evolution to look for pattern and significance. Who has not experienced the hairs rising on the back of the neck from seeing something pass quickly by out of the corner of your eye? Was it really just a fluttering leaf or something more sinister? The ability to see the pattern of stripes lurking partly disguised in a stand of trees could mean the difference between survival and being eaten by a hidden tiger. As social omnivores, both predator and prey animals, recognising patterns could in our evolutionary past have been the difference between life and death, survival and starvation. And we have developed technological, social and artistic constructs that depend upon our need to see pattern.

The entire history of science and the scientific method exists to find patterns in the way the world around us works and to test those patterns against reality. Experimental methods such as the double blind trial have had to be developed to prevent subject and experimenter from seeing patterns where none exist. The need to find patterns manifests itself in spiritual manifestations, tealeaf reading, ley lines, all of which may actually have significance but are much more likely to be the result of coincidence; but it seems our default position is always to see significance in such phenomena.

The finding of strange, apparently supernatural, significance in random events is such a common experience that we even have a word for it – serendipity.

Of course, the picture of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is not a Rorschach blot, a random collection of marks onto which the viewer projects an image of their own making. Picasso, like all artists, uses a subtle set of hints and signals which we, looking at the picture, complete to construct the image we ‘see’. In fact, of course, because perception is both an automatic and a cognitive process, biological and cultural, the further away in time we are from the creation of a work the more we will perceive it differently from the artist and his/her contemporaries. This is something that we simply have to take into account and live with, and is common to all creative work. A Byzantine icon, The Canterbury Tales, a symphony by William Boyce, will all have carried deeply moving significances for their audiences that are forever lost.

"Men look at women and women watch themselves being looked at"

This is one of the most famous quotes from John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing', now nearly 40 years old, and sums up a universal truth, not just in the painting of the nude, but in everyday interactions between men and women.

His take on the nude is that all post renaissance pictures of naked women represent an act of possession. The (white male) owner displays his painting to his friends and acquaintances as a surrogate for the real thing, a bit of sublimated penis waving. This is certainly true for many pictures, particularly in the 19th century, when the new industrial class felt they had something to prove and wanted titillation combined with respectability, which they could get by calling it 'art'. 

The Alma Tadema Tepidatrium is a classic case - a soap-powder magnate collects lots of erotic pictures of droopy girls and builds a gallery for them - which he names after his wife! The Lady Lever Art Gallery; glorious Victorian hypocrisy. Don't get me wrong, I think it is a fantastic painting, sensual, beautiful, and Alma Tadema knows just what the score is - look at the post orgasmic symbolism of that scraper! Also, if you love the Pre-Raphaelites, I would seriously recommend the gallery; it really is full of some wonderful 19th century paintings.

This tradition of surrogate possession of the female nude  is also very much a tradition that continues to day. Notice how this type of image can still never avoid hypocrisy - they always have just that little hint of coyness, in this case in the placing of the faux body paint, echoing Alma Tadema's feather.

But actually, I think Berger is being too simplistic in seeing all post renaissance nudes in this way. I suspect that the image of the female nude reflects the place of women more generally in society during the period when the picture was painted. I am not sure that the women in Boucher's soft porn paintings from the mid 18th century carry quite the same atmosphere of ownership (if anything these girls look more likely to have been rented). These are images from an earlier more socially although not politically liberal age where a lot of the 19th century inhibitions do not apply and here the viewer is much more hopeful voyeur rather than owner and controller.

However, Berger definitely has something. A woman's view of her body and how she looks is almost always very different from that of a man. And men do look at women. Much of this has more to do with hormones on both sides rather than any concept of a person as property. However, there is also an undercurrent of power and control which goes well beyond nudity into the everyday image of a woman and her appearance.

It stuns me that issues about dress, uniform and appearance, whether slutwalks, anorexia, fashion models weight, the wearing of the burqa, or even religious symbols at work almost always seem to centre around women. All this seems to be about power, whether the power of other people (not always only men) over a woman's body or her own power to control that body shape and weight or what she wears. If this looks like a feminist critique it isn't really. I am basically a libertarian on this - I can't honestly see why, practical considerations aside, people, male or female, should not wear or look how they want. If I am shocked by someone's appearance, that is my problem and I should learn from the experience. That is the approach I take to anyone who through physical appearance is out of the norm.

Anyone painting the nude or even attending a life class has standing behind them this whole history and cultural tradition of the portrayal of the naked body, particularly the female body. If you are sensitive to these issues you can often almost feel the power flowing as surprisingly cultural sensitivity and taboo grants authority to the one naked person amongst a group of clothed people in the room.

Berger goes on to say much more about power issues and how they affect women's view of themselves and men's view of women. It is well worth reading and still challenging now.

I have just a couple of observations about life drawing and painting, though. From my experience, when women take their clothes off they usually look beautiful, when men do the same they usually look a bit funny. This may be my hormones, but I have noticed that female artists also usually prefer the female form as well. A male model may be very good indeed, especially if you are looking at character, form, strength, but for grace and sensuality the female form is best - also the mistakes don't show as much.

Just as a postscript see this take on the issue from Jean Baudrillard:

"At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves."

Now that is whole other blog.

Struggling with Ambiguity

I am really struggling with my painting at the moment in my efforts to explore figuration but to keep some sense of uncertainty and ambiguity.

 My problems are:

• I find it difficult to paint or draw something that does not actually look like what it is. The technique I  have evolved over the years is to work from the general to the specific - to work into detail. So now I am attempting to paint a figure and then to deconstruct it while the paint is still wet or to layer it over.
• Colour - I am working so fast that I am still getting carried away instead of planning and thinking. Having worked in pastel for so many years and now trying to work in paint, I am having to relearn mixing techniques while still remembering how to balance colours  and plan using a limited colour palette. I have started trying it experiment with the acrylic and I am getting some real disasters.
• Composition - my least worry. Working fast and experimenting wit colour means that my composition has pretty much gone by the board

See what you thing of this mixture of crisis and disaster. I was looking at some images of Pig Dyke Molly Morris dancers  taken from photographs I took at the Towersey Festival in 2010.  Mollys  are dancers who dress in women's clothes (presumably taken from the 18th century expression - Molly, meaning a gay transvestite prostitute) - in this case most of them actually are women with a  sort of post feminist take on Morris dancing (has to be seen to be believed). I like that way that Molly dancers challenge our view of sexuality and femininity.

I wanted to play with colour as a commentary on their exclusively black and white costumes.It worked OK with a limited blue/purple palette, but when I tried to experiment with red and green, the whole thing collapsed.

I have had a bit more luck with a portrait  of George Bernard Shaw, from an old photograph. A similar limited colour palette, but I seem to be getting somewhere.

Really I would like to be producing something like Frank Auerbach's portraits. He manages to express character through the actual quality of the paint and I am envious of his confidence in the use of colour. and strident brush or palette knife work, although I am trying to make my work a little more ambiguous.

I have managed something like this in a painting I did at life class the other day. The colour and composition still leave something to be desired, but I think I may be making progress: