A Rant with Perspective.
Part 1.
These views are entirely my own, I make no apologies for what follows…
Some noble but misguided notion lead me well and truly off piste last week with regard to the subject of my Wednesday drawing class. It has been a while since I gave much thought to my old frenemy: perspective. We go back a long way but we’ve never have liked each other much.
Until I became a professional artist, by which I mean showing and selling commercial painting, I had kept like a guilty secret, my avoidance of the dark art of perspective and managed to find quite adequate ways around it. “IT” seemed like a very grown-up, mathematical and secretively mystical like something akin to the Masons.
Around that time I was invited on a painting trip with a well-known artist to…Venice. To begin with I was utterly overwhelmed especially as I was daily, painting with someone who oozed perspective confidence. I began to tentatively paint the bits that stuck out of the Venetian skyline, small, unassuming dove-filled turrets. One day my painter friend with consummate 3 point perspective skills, called my bluff and insisted on teaching me and reluctantly I let her. At the time it sort of made sense, in that I began to paint buildings, lots of them and lost my fear. I realise now though that Venetian Architecture although stupendously beautiful wasn’t what inspired me, I would have been better off painting people and buildings only where they got in the way. But I was young and impressionable.
Over the next twenty years I gained a lot of teaching experience and taught perspective only as an adjunct to looking. My adult groups were richly diverse and I became fascinated with the way other people see the world and over time I saw a pattern emerge. Often (but by no means always) men liked the idea of perspective and sometimes came to class with an already extensive knowledge and a few bearing home-made Heath Robinson type alarming-looking mechanical aids. They related perspective to their drawings in a practical engineering, concerned with gravity, way. Generally speaking (*) women were more likely to favour contour and line drawing with a marked interest in surface and texture. And if that all sounds sexist well that’s how it was…
The best example of what I am talking about is the time I had in my class a technical draughtsman, highly skilled at conceptualising 3 dimensional forms and translating them into two. His resulting drawings were practical in that they were believably functional but lacked character of place, history and uniqueness. The following week in an attempt to get the students really looking I took them out into the landscape to draw and paint ancient crumbly Tudor buildings. It seemed as though, away from the college in the real world, the students had referred back to ancient default settings, the draughtsman produced competent solid box-like, all weather structures, generically Tudor, as did most of the other men to some extent, almost as if the technical parts of their brains had been triggered. The women on the other hand struggled with structure and concreteness but…the sense of crumbly ancient, lived, specific human dwelling was almost palpable especially in the details.
What one gender lacked the other seemed to exaggerate. This all started to feel like the contrast between convergent and divergent thinking styles, and set me off on a quest that I am still pursuing, which is, Could there possibly be (subtle) gendered perceptual differences?
*When I say “Generally speaking” I am referring to the 70/30 rule.
(Part 2. To follow)
