I gained so much knowledge in this world building class at Brainstorm in the summer of 2019. Since then it’s been hard being able to afford any more art classes, and then the world went to hell in 2020. I’ve been focusing on starting a business, which I will elaborate on some other time. But enough about that. I wanna talk a bit about these:
I chose ancient Egypt as the theme for all the drawings I did in the class. The temple was modeled in 3D and then illustrated in Procreate. The rest were drawn in Procreate (an iPad pro software). The image of the market involved a lot of application of everything I’ve learned regarding value grouping and management, and I consider this to be the first time I really applied value organization across an entire scene. The buildings were fun to make, and the interior too. It was great expanding on what I usually create.
Those were really intense 9 weeks and a lot of fun.
It started with a square canvas which I built from wood. One of the first panels I ever made. It was the summer vacation in my Art school in Seattle and some of the students hired a model to pose for us for a long pose. 6 hours a day for 4 days.
I brought the canvas with me not knowing what the pose will be. When I finished the painting, working from life, it had an abstract background. I placed the figure in the center and I had no idea of what environment she might belong to.
I was really inspired by the pose but I felt that an abstract background did not fit it at all. A few months later, I realized what the right background for this figure is: It needed to be the inside of a tent, overlooking the desert at sunset, because the woman reminded me of some kind of Arabian royalty. The pose was very organic, and communicated confidence and relaxation at the same time. I imagined her being on a journey of some kind, and being royalty, the tent would naturally be luxurious and private.
So I decided to take the pose from the 4 walls of an art studio into a setting closer to a fancy bedouin tent. Having been in those a few times in Israel in the Negev desert, and getting a glimpse of that very simple, slow lifestyle, I wanted to paint something with that warm, slow atmosphere, something that adjusts itself to the pace of the desert where life moves slowly at the end of the day.
That new aspiration presented a challenge, because I had to invent the background and have it match the studio light – the light under which the model was standing. At that point I started searching for references for different bedouin tent elements online. I tried to get an idea of how a fancy Bedouin tent might look like and what kind of items would be in it. I used photoshop to try to arrange them together to get an idea of an environment. After a while of doing that I realized the complexity of the scene requires a much more realistic model to paint from, if I wanted the background to match the degree of detail of the figure.
I went to a craft store, where I shopped around for a few hours, gathering items and getting ideas. When I left the store I had almost everything I needed and I sat down to build the tent.
I made a tiny little sculpture of the women to “calibrate” the light. Used a clamp-on book light to replace the studio light and used a candle for a lantern. Overall there were 3 light sources in the painting.
I sewed the little pillows from various fabrics I bought wrapped around tiny pieces of sponge. I made the tent by sticking some wooden sticks into a corkscrew board. It was like building a tiny dollhouse.
I did a small value study to try to figure out the composition.
Once I had the tent, I was ready to paint. The first step was to do a perspective drawing. The strange thing is that here, I had to decide what the eye level is rather than it being decided for me, because I had to identify the original eye level according to the rendering of the figure.
Fast forward, I finished the background.
Lastly, I decided I had to change the direction of her head because to me, the meaning of the painting and the moment was in having this woman look outside, to the last remnant of light on the desert sand. So I drew a little diagram of the new angle:
Then, because I couldn’t have the original model posing for me again with the original light (though believe me, I have dreamt of it!!), I recreated the new angle based on the colors and values of the painting combined with this drawing (which was drawn with the aid of pictures). A note to myself was to always take notes of what colors I used in my paintings so that I can easily go back to them if needed.
Here is the study for the head. It involved a lot of interpolation since I did not have a model to paint from.
Lastly I needed to seam the edges of the figure with the new background and to add hints of light to match the new environment. Add little objects, like the teapot and the carpet, a little thorn to decorate the table.
It was a difficult painting but I gave this lady the environment she belongs to, as I saw it and now the painting is complete. 🙂
‘Glimpse of the Desert’, 23”x24”, oil painting on board.
Most works of art are presented to us, the viewers/ readers, without explanation. They ignore our existence and are yet designed to display themselves to us as if we are the center of their universe. “Here is an interesting story”, “Here is a collection of sounds”, “Here is a picture for you to look at” “It’s just here, choose if you want to get involved in this made-up story and made up universe or not”. No explanation is given as to why you should get involved and when you read it, the story is told as if you’re not really there. As if the story exists in some fifth dimension. We take all of that for granted and just enjoy the artwork, but when you stop to think about it, the idea that someone is presenting us a story without acknowledging our presence is rather peculiar, interesting and worth consideration.
What’s more is that the events in the artwork are not just presented randomly. Everything is planned and crafted around you, the viewer, to show you something interesting, beautiful or important, but without acknowledging that you are there to see it (nor is the existence of the author/ artist that created it acknowledged). This is a third person story telling, and, just like it is the most common in literature, so it is also most common in visual art.
Consider, for example, this painting:
Talk about being in the right place at the right time! We just happen to be exactly at the spot allowing us to see this exceptional moment, from a location that shows us clearly and beautifully the story that unfolds, at a crucial moment of the plot. The figures are arranged to appear most beautifully composed from this particular angle, there is nothing in our way, the composition is carefully crafted to maximize our clarity and sense of beauty of the scene, and yet the way the painting is portrayed, it is like we are not even there. The characters in the painting do not know we are observing them or seem to recognize it, even though we are given the best seat in the stadium.
What’s even “funnier” is that paintings would often add random elements to make it seem like the painting is NOT intentionally trying to display itself to you, but that you rather accidentally stumbled across the scene. This is done by placing foreground objects (like the branches of plant covering the baby) and by keeping the main events off center.
But every now and then, artists also create visual art in the second or first person point of view.
The first person point of view in story telling, is when the author is describing their own experiences. Unlike the third-person pov, the existence of a creator is not taken for granted but is instead made the center of the work.
In visual art, this would be represented by self portraits where the artist is portrayed in the act of painting.
A perfect example is this self portrait by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun
The portrait presents to a viewer the creator herself, while creating a painting. It’s like writing a story that describes what the author is doing at any given moment. First-person storytelling in visual art is more tricky than in literature, because in literature, an author can describe themselves doing all sorts of activities, but in visual art, if the artist just shows themselves doing an activity, it wouldn’t be immediately known that it is them, unless the title or the plaque of the painting says so. And even then, it hardly changes the meaning of what is actually displayed in the piece. So mostly, first-person story telling are paintings about the act of painting. They may or may not acknowledge the existence of a viewer.
This brings us to the last category, the second-person point of view. In this method the existence of the viewer is acknowledged and the story is told as if told to you, the viewer. It is described in this website as: “This point of view treats the reader as the main character in the story. Other characters refer to the reader as “you.” Descriptions are based on what you would see if you were in that situation. This narrative voice is generally reserved for explanatory articles and how-to books, but adventurous writers will occasionally pen a short story or novel in the second person.”
I could not think of a better example than this drawing by Jason Brady. It is more likely that many would think of this drawing as an interesting gimmick, but actually it is an example of a rare category of point of view in art. Art that interacts directly with the viewer and makes the viewer the center of the piece and the center of the story.
In this drawing, you are playing a chess game with death. I believe it is your move, and you better choose wisely because the price of losing is gonna be high.
You are deliberately given a low eye level. Death is towering over you. The chess pieces are giant, bigger than you, almost, and death is staring right at you, waiting for you to make your move.
A common type of second-person pov in visual art is portraits. Especially when the person in the portrait is looking straight at you.
Angelica Kauffmann, Self Portrait 1797
Portraits are explicit about displaying someone to a viewer and they explicitly acknowledge the viewer, especially if the person in them is looking at the viewer like in this portrait. There is no narrative, though. It is a very simple, yet stylized, presentation of the character and looks of one person to another (or others, in plural).
Here is another example of a second-person pov, in this drawing by comic book artist Joe Madureira
You are definitely acknowledged as the part of the scene here. In fact, every painting in which a character deliberately makes eye contact with you, the viewer, is a second person pov.
Some paintings will make a viewer implicitly part of the scene without making eye contact or directly interacting with them. The painting can assign the viewer a role by controlling their location in the scene. The eye level and distance from the scene play a crucial role here. In third person pov there is an unexplained distance in which anything could happen. But some paintings will explain everything, all the way down to your nose. This can be achieved by rendering objects that nearly touch you or stand in your way as the viewer.
A scene could be either composed in a distance, as if you are watching a play, or it can be viewed from a point of view inside the scene. I can’t quite classify all examples, but consider this painting by Norman Rockwell, Freedom of Speech:
You, the viewer, is specifically located inside the scene, sitting in with the rest of the crowd, looking back to see this young man in the row behind you standing up. you even have the man next to him partially blocking your view. The painting does not acknowledge you directly as a viewer, but it assigns you a place in the scene that is inside the scene. He chose specifically to place us in the crowd’s eye level to emphasize the monumental action of the man standing up to speak. This effect would be nearly ruined if our eye level was changed to look at the scene from above, for example. And the meaning and focus of the scene would have changed completely if we were looking at the whole courtroom from a distance, even if the same event was depicted.
The majority of visual art works are in the third person point of view and set a scene that is viewed as if in a theater. The space between the viewer and the scene is not fully explained. You could be viewing it through a window, or a few feet away, or just seeing a poster. But You are not directly assigned a role or a place in the scene.
To illustrate, here are a few examples:
Frédéric Soulacroix, Spring
Frank Dicksee, Yseult
Ivan Shishkin, Gathering Storm
Thomas Couture, Romans during the Decadence
Richard Bergh Nordic, Summers evening
Maxfield Parrish, Morning
Eugen de Blaas, The Flirtation
Jean Leon Gerome, Desert Quest
William Adolphe Bouguereau, Nymphes et satyre
John Everett Millais
I hope you see that in all of these, you get a sense of a scene deliberately being displayed to you. You are separate from the scene, observing it. You are not part of it and no role is assigned to you. There is no voice of the creator, either.
Some paintings make the viewer part of the scene by changing the eye level, the distance from the picture plane, or add depth to the painting such that items in the painting extend beyond the displayed scene and reach out or encompass the location of the viewer. In all the paintings of the 3rd person pov above, there is a distance between the scene and the viewer which is not visually explained. In painting where the viewer is assigned a location or a role, that distance is explained. It is more common in game art which I included in some of the examples:
League of Legends Game art
Arsène Vigeant, John Singer Sargent
In the first, you are somewhere on the ground, the grass obstructing your view, just about to be discovered by this dangerous assassin. In the second, you are right in front of the man in the painting, who looks like he is about to step in your direction or start talking to you. In the third, there are those poles right in front of your face, while the area of the interest, the couple, is all the way in the right of the picture, suggesting you are viewing the entire scene by chance. The Degas painting suggests that you are right there in front of them, strolling around the room. there is really little distance between you and the people in the room. The gameart of Zyra, looking right at you, or the other Zyra which you catch a glimpse of from behind the plants. The size of the plants suggests that they are right in your face, which places you at a specific distance from the scene.
I find that many paintings are still difficult for me to categorize clearly. The tools of visual art are different than those of literature but I find a lot of fascinating commonalities between the two. Another thing this topic has made me realize is that the location of the viewer in your scene is a tool to communicate different messages in your artwork. Things like the eye level and perspective play a significant role, beyond just organizing objects in a scene realistically. They can serve the goal of involving a viewer in your painting to varying degrees. In many paintings, the viewer is just there to watch and appreciate and in some – to participate in different ways. Your art will have a different psychological effect and a different message depending on what you choose.
