Training the eyes

During the build up to the World Cup rugby final the Guardian sports section had an article on the work of Dr Sherylle Calder. She was reported on as being the most successful coach in the modern rugby era and she works as a 'vision specialist'. She works with the players developing regular eye exercises and tries to get them to avoid too much time on mobile phones and other similar devices because they don't exercise eye muscles and the attention awareness sections of the brain associated with peripheral vision, spatial awareness and rapid and flexible eye movement. Her training methods reminded me of the work we used to do in teaching drawing during the mid 1970s and early 1980s, especially when we were trying to highlight how kinetic awareness was tightly connected to spatial awareness. We would set up drawing situations designed specifically to test spatial awareness and as part of the process throw into the situation balls of crumpled up paper that would be deliberately thrown in from behind the students' backs, therefore entering their fields of vision at random unexpected moments. This on the one hand kept attention high and on the other forced them to be inventive in how they dealt with these spatial 'explosions'.

Dr Sherylle Calder has an on line eye gym and if you go there you can test out your own ability to see and recognise situations quickly. It is very revealing and makes you aware of how little time we spend exercising our eye/brain responses, particularly when we spend so much of our time handling dangerous machinery such as cars and other mechanical constructs that demand that we stay in a state of controlled awareness for long periods of time.
The speed of reaction of ball players used to be a constant topic of conversation in those long ago days of teaching drawing. Visual and spatial awareness was at the core of so much of what we did, the making of images being subordinate to the construction of visual fields of engagement.

Hans Hofmann notes on approaching a drawing

One of the most important influences on teaching drawing at that time was Hans Hofmann. His drawn notes above being typical of what was being discussed in a drawing studio when I began teaching. What were your eyes picking up first, where did attention then move to? In what direction and in what rhythmic form did the eyes move as they sought out both space and formal relationships? Did an awareness of the space begin at the bottom edge of the drawing? If not why not and where did it begin? I would suggest that this type of approach to drawing lasted from the late 1940s until the 1980s and it was central to a whole generation of artist / teachers that had been influenced by abstract expressionism. In England my own awareness of this approach to drawing came via Peter Lanyon, who had taught the artist Patrick Oliver who had been apprenticed to him because of the influence of Patrick's father the art critic W. T. Oliver. When I began teaching drawing on the foundation course at Leeds the staff were very post-Harry Thubron in their understanding of visual language and Patrick Oliver was the most vociferous exponent of both Thubron and Lanyon's teaching methods. Oliver had worked alongside Lanyon in his studio in the 1950s and Lanyon had when he had time, given Oliver things to think about when making paintings. For instance one day Lanyon put a house brick down on one of Oliver's paintings and said to him, "When I decide to pick that brick up, you need to be able to paint the space it was in". Lanyon encouraged 'fast' seeing and Oliver used to ride motor bikes through the Yorkshire landscape and explore his perceptual memories of this experience in his paintings. Lanyon pushed these experiences even further and took up gliding as a way of heightening his spatial awareness of the Cornish landscape, an approach that would lead to his death in a gliding accident in 1964.

Hans Hofmann drawing of a landscape view

The drawing above by Hofmann shows how this type of awareness often began to be transcribed into drawings. The placement of forms such as triangles and lines, is composed in such a way that they combine to make rhythmic shapes that keep the eye moving through the drawing. I well remember Oliver looking in students' drawings for 'enclosed' or 'trapped' forms, i. e. these would be shapes that locked the eye movement into them and so held the looking in one spot. These would have to be broken, so that the eye movement could continue to revolve around the image. He was very critical of what he called the centralised image, something I am now very interested in, but which in those days would have been criticised because it did not generate action for the eyes. The central image it was argued, prioritised the verbal language element of thinking, therefore removed the eye/brain from experiencing the space / form of the image as the brain moved into thinking about the semiotics of the image rather than the experience of the moment.
Looking back to that time I'm now more aware of a political stance that related to this position. Fixed images could be seen as commodities that could then be sold. The flux of experience was much harder to sell.

Peter Lanyon

In the drawing above by Lanyon you can see lines following the movement of the searching eyes as they look from foreground to background. You are supposed to look through the space, not at the objects you encounter. Patrick Oliver used to say that you need to make drawings in a similar way to how a bird flies through a thick set hedge. If the bird was looking at all the various small branches and twigs as it moved it would very quickly become entangled in the complexity of thinking about the thingness of the various experiences, however if the bird simply flew through the space, the things that could have impeded its way just disappeared. The space was the path that needed to be taken, the objects in this world were simply irrelevancies, only made relevant because we have a verbal language that needs to identify nouns with things and prioritises thingness over action.

Patrick Oliver: Irish Painting

The painting above was made by Oliver in the early 1980s and is typical of his approach. You are meant to re-experience a ride through the Irish landscape, the colour being as much about treading in a cowpat when you dismounted from your motorbike, as looking up at a blue sky or seeing hills in the distance. The totality of the experience was something Oliver believed he could re-create in paint. 

At the time I loved the epic romanticism of the man, his firm belief in the power of painting to re-create experience and to provide an arena for the eyes to exercise themselves within. It was always 'eyes', the old principal of the art college Frank Lisle had lost one eye during the second world war and Patrick would accuse him of no longer being able to paint properly because of this. The spaces in these paintings were designed for bi-focal vision, angle of line and form as well as surface adjustment being designed to trigger mental spaces as the two eyes attempted to focus. Oliver would demonstrate this in the studio by getting students to watch him trying to pull apart two straight edges, such as two lengths of 2 x 1 timber. He would say that they were stuck together by a very sticky invisible substance, but if he pulled hard enough he could separate the edges, but this would leave between them a plane composed of a very taut surface of infinitely thin invisible glue. He would then mime a struggle to separate the two lengths of timber, finally shaking with the effort he would not just separate them but would then twist them in relation to each other. "Now", he would say "how do you see the space between these two timbers?" 

There is still a memory of those times in the back of my head every time I draw. I'm now once again attracted to the issues associated with a word bound experience and how to go beyond them, but am looking at the resolution from a more 'vibrant materialist' perspective. Those times had a very interesting approach to the problem and I think it has reemerged as an aspect of speculative realism and other approaches to materialist thinking. I am also putting up this post as a reminder that old experiences are never 'wrong' just simply other worlds waiting to reemerge as fresh made for another time.

See also:

Eye tracking technology
The hard won image

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

A straight line

Other posts about teaching during the 1970s and 80s.

More on pulling space apart in a flat drawing
How to address the paper surface