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This document discusses biological motion research and how it relates to gesture drawing. It explores how the brain processes and constructs visual motion as well as how to interpret gesture. The research can provide new tools and insights for art students and teachers in the studio.
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- 1. Understanding how the brain processes motion: Biological motion research and gesture drawing Jayme Jacobson Washington State University Foundations in Art, Theory, and Education Conference April 1-4, 2009 Portland, Oregon
- 2. New Tools for the Toolbox
- 3. Understanding how our brains construct the visual world
- 5. Bringing it back to the studio
Editor's Notes
- Within the foundations of art instruction there exists a time-tested toolbox devised to equip fledgling artists for the challenge of concretizing their ideas into visual formats. We are all familiar with these tools; they include the mechanics of color, of linear perspective, of shading and a variety of techniques that are specific to various media. These tools are offered not as an end in and of themselves but rather as a kind of backbone to the analytical reasoning that is frequently needed to work through the production of a piece of art. When a student gets stuck, she has recourse to these tools for figuring out how to make needed changes i.e., why to shift the color in a given direction or how to adjust a line so that it falls into perspective.
- What has not traditionally been included in this toolbox is any specific information about how the brain constructs what we see. This is hardly surprising since it has been only in the last ten to twenty years that some of the puzzle pieces of the visual system have begun to be pieced together by vision scientists. As artists, we have long intuited that vision is not exactly a passive process. We know that the pictorial surface is not the world. It is like the old joke told about Picasso’s response to a man criticizing him for not making more realistic art. When Picasso asked him what he meant by realistic art, the man pulled out a snapshot of his wife; Picasso looked at the photograph and observed, "So your wife is two inches tall, two-dimensional, with no arms and no legs, and no color but only shades of gray?" We laugh because, as practitioners, we’ve long ago internalized the idea that the canvas is not the world. What is harder to wrap our brains around is that the world is not the world. It takes nearly a third of the brain to collect, sort, and redirect incoming information so that the visual world can be constructed. A huge amount of neural resources go into building what seems to flow so effortlessly into our open eyes. How does emerging information about these neural constructs impact our practice as artists? Is it possible that we could use this information to extend the boundaries of artistic production in much the same way they were extended during another historic intersection of art and science, the period when linear perspective was developed? During this panel presentation I would like to suggest that there are many aspects of vision science that belong in the artist’s toolbox but I will focus on specific visual research that can be used to extend the students’ understanding of figure drawing.
- For artists these results may be more satisfying than surprising. The importance of gesture as potent form of communication has long been understood in our field; however, having the sensitivity of the viewer empirically demonstrated certainly strengthens the case.
- The studio portion of this second movement module focused primarily on these two concepts: 1) the fact that as observers the students would be highly sensitive to even the most subtle aspects of the model’s movements; and 2) that any gestural marks they made in trying to capture the model’s form would be interpretable by someone viewing the finished piece. We began with the standard brief gesture poses, gradually working up to longer intervals and after the students had warmed up a bit we asked the model to begin giving us real and deceptive poses that mimicked some of the biological motion studies, that is poses where he would really try to pick up something heavy followed by a pose where he would pretend to; or a pose where he would really throw a ball followed by one where he would pretend to. The students got fairly involved in making suggestions for deceptive poses. Afterwards, during critique, we laid out the pretend and the real poses side-by-side so that everyone could try and guess which were which. It turned out that we were able to determine it correctly in every instance. Frankly, this surprised me. This was a cross listed course with psychology and the majority of students had never drawn from a model. Two of them had never had any kind of formal drawing instruction. And yet, here they were, picking up on the subtlety of the arch of a back or the angle of a shoulder to differentiate the real from the pretended pose.