To speak of appearances, as many aestheticians, philosophers and art teachers do, is to talk in a very particular way about the things that we see. It is to suggest a vaguely sceptical attitude in which the entire realm of the visual is understood as being somewhat deceptive, faulty, incomplete or illusory. Appearances are conceived in this way as something 'out there' in the world that we passively receive. Things are thought to present themselves to us through appearances, and in so doing they undergo distortions that make them 'seem' not as we know they are. A commonly cited example would be the circular disk that is believed to 'appear' as an ellipse when tilted relative to our position.
To 'appear' is to come into view but it is also to ‘seem’. The latter form must
surely be the one most commonly intended in descriptions of appearances. It is
certainly unlikely that anyone would seriously suggest that appearances involve
any form of active agency or any wilful determination on the part of objects to reveal or obstruct
their apprehension: to 'present' themselves. Yet there remains a suggestion that appearances are objective properties of things. To speak of appearances in this way is
to pay surprisingly little attention to the role of perception – indeed it is
to regard perception as being only indirectly related to appearances. If appearances
are indeed attributes of things located out there in the world then they must, of necessity,
precede perception - they must come before it and can be in no way dependent
upon it.
A
tilted disk cannot be both an ellipse and a circular disk at the same time. We
all know that a tilted disk is a tilted disk and not an ellipse, no matter how
much art teachers might insist that what we are in fact seeing is an ellipse; if
only we would look hard enough to see
what is in front of our eyes. A significant proportion of the teaching of representational
drawing is predicated upon this notion of appearances – as if everything we see
were in fact some kind of pre-packaged two-dimensional representation that we
simply have to copy onto paper, as if ellipses and foreshortening and negative
space etc. were uncomplicated objective properties of the world. If this were
the case one wonders why children and the naïve are so unanimous in their
conviction that circles are circular. Have they not yet learned to look? And if
looking comes before knowing – as it surely does – wouldn’t they be able to
draw what they see before they can draw what they know?
Contrary
to popular opinion, what children and the naïve draw is not the product of a
lack of looking or even a lack of visual discrimination on their part nor is it
a lack of dexterity. If you think that children lack dexterity then you should
look again. Beyond the mere scribbles of infants, in nearly every child’s
drawing I have ever seen, their ability to join the ends of a circle is
practically faultless. If this doesn’t prove that children can manipulate
pencils with a high degree of accuracy then I don’t know what test would.
It
is very true that children draw what they know rather than what they see. We
could go further than this and say that what children and the naïve draw is not
what they see, they draw what they perceive. Perceiving is not another word for
seeing. Perceiving is our response to things seen. Perceiving is the knowledge
we form on the basis of what we see and therefore children strive to draw what
they perceive – what they know of
what they see.
To
say that what the naïve artist needs to do if they wish to produce
photorealistic drawings is simply to look harder or to see more exactly is presumptuous
at best. To believe that the failure of untrained and naïve artists to draw
perspectivally correct images is due to a lack of observation skills - of attention
to appearances - flies in the face of millennia of representations by
innumerable artists, many of whom have devoted their lives to image-making and the
disciplined observation of the visible.
What
the naïve artist needs to learn is not to see better or to look harder but to acquire
the sophisticated strategies of perspectival simulation and pictorial
representation. By doing so they will continue to see things just like the rest of
us but their perception will have changed in a fundamental way: they will now know how to make pictorial representations of
tilted disks, and much else besides.
