Something my wife said about photography reminded me of this phrase today. I recall that I am often told, of some great painting or photograph, that the work “guides” or “leads” or even “forces” your eyes from some named point A to some other named point B (and some other points may be thrown in there as well).
I recall that I have never understood what this is supposed to mean. I mean, I can parse the sentence, and I can imagine what it means. But I’ve never really seen this happening in my own experience of a work.
Can anyone provide examples where this effect is really obvious?
Have actual measurements been taken about this? Has it been established that people really do, physically, focus on the areas it is said they focus on, in the order it is said they focus on?
My wife says this all has something to do with triangles. What is she talking about?
Is there a term or phrase for this I can use to poke around in wikipedia or something?
This is something that has driven me just a little bit nuts since I was a wee tyke.
It’s all about interest. In a well composed painting, photograph, even sculpture, there should be points of high interest scattered about the page, so that you look at the entire thing. It’s really quite that simple. In my opinion, the best way to demonstrate this is with the Cubists.
Now, look at that picture. Do you see your eye starting somewhere, then you look somewhere else, then somewhere else, then somewhere else? There’s a reason, but it doesn’t matter as much as the fact that it exists.
Now, about the triangle - does she mean the Golden Ratio, section, or something like that?
ETA: I just realized you meant something more planned. Give me a second. For now, use the above to understand about your eye gliding over the image and I’ll be back of more forceful things.
I’ve had art in college. I’ve sat through hours of slideshows where the prof points out what we’re supposed to see first and what’s supposed to interest us. It almost never coincides with what I see first and what interests me.
It sounds like a really uneducated thing to say - and it’s a generalization so it’s not always true, or always completely true - but so much “art” is bullshit it nearly turns my stomach.
I’m not playing “Gotcha ya!” - any one can see they are the same image. A common perceptual response is that we focus more on the right side of the image. You know, screen-right asymmetry or whatever it’s called in cinematography. My point was that the second image looks like a harder hill to climb, because having the image on the left is more natural to us.
About a hundred years ago, I talked to a tabloid (thrifty nickel) editor who told me that he would lay out the important items on pages in a “reverse six.” One theory, at least, is that people read the headline…then continue down the right side…across the bottom…up to the vertical midpoint…then left to right. Like a six, only backward.
The left one looks a bit steeper than the right one to me… though I’m pretty sure the picture is actually symmetrical and this is sort of an optical illusion.
My eye fell on the movie side first, then the girl side, then back and forth. The painting seems to me to be about the movie and the girl–not about either one more than the other.*
I just get a gmail login page when I click this link.
-FrL-
*Also, I really like that painting. Let me tell you why, as doing so may help you diagnose my “condition” by showing you how I think about art, and thereby help you find a way to illustrate to me what you’re trying to illustrate to me.
The painting gives the girl the appearance of being isolated, alienating herself from what’s going on, being somehow alone–except if you think about it, she’s done this by disengaging herself from what is fundamentally contrived and unreal (the movie on the screen) and instead thinking very seriously (I presume) about something real and uncontrived. Who’s more disengaged and alienated? The lonely girl or the people in the theater watching the screen “together”? By thinking about the girl, we learn something about the movie theater, and vice versa. Etc etc. Makes ya think and so on.
Didn’t mean to imply that you were. The thing about this particular image is that the first thing I notice about it is that it’s the same image with one side reversed. Neither bicyclist looks as if he’s having a harder time than the other.
It seems to me to be about the girl. First, the right side is brightly lit so it draws the eye to that side. Second, there are no faces on the ‘movie’ side and nothing of interest on the screen. So we have the usherette whose face we see, standing in a lit area either dozing on her feet or thinking about something or undergoing some personal problem vs. some anonymous people sitting in the dark. The story is on the right.
It’s obvious that it’s a mirror image, and I would have had the same response as you… except that I do seem to see a right-sided bias. The slope on the right just looks steeper to me, even though I know they are the same. Of course, Frylock sees it the other way round, so we cancel each other out as far as backing ZebraShaSha’s theory is concerned.
But then, I’m not seeing anything in the Sexy Lamp one either (aside from the obvious that it looks like two bottoms; or, with the triangular lamp, vaguely like an up-skirt). Or the naked woman on the main page. I’m supposed to defecate masonry because there’s this pretty naked girl and the guy is sitting on the couch apparently watching TV? Or is there something I’m missing?
See, though, the girl is an usher at the movie theater, which means, to me, that she’s not so much thinking real and uncontrived thoughts as it does that she’s bored out of her freakin’ mind because she’s already seen this movie 30 times in the last 2 weeks.
Obviously the painting is about the girl, or should be about the girl, and Edward Hopper put her in the right side on purpose. Everything you said about it is entirely correct, Frylock - along with Jayjay and whoever else had theories about it. It’s all correct. But for your theory, how she is alienated, really depends on her placement within the canvas, which is what I was trying to get at.
by showing you how I think about art, and thereby help you find a way to illustrate to me what you’re trying to illustrate to me.
