Meeting Barry Plummer, Authority, and Editor of “Evan Walters: Moments of Vision”
5 October 2011
Howard Gardens, CSAD
Rob Pepperell is getting a proposal together to put on a show about vision and painting. The show will include works of historical and contemporary art, which try in different ways to deal with how we truly see the world, and ourselves in it. It is a rich subject, which has not only been looked into by artists, but philosophers, anthropologists, and more recently in the past few decades, neuroscientists.
How we see and paint the world ‘outside’ has been revolutionised by the likes of Cézanne, Picasso and Braque, but there is an untold story of how British painters have tried to tackle this problem.
The earliest British artist exploring how we really see the world seems to be Evan Walters, who used brush marks to elongate his subjects horizontally, to show how each of our individual eyes see the same thing simultaneously, but from slightly different angles. His explorations led to his painting in ‘double-vision’ (physiological diplopia), and what at first sight is a very strange, ‘cyclopic’ self-portrait entitled ‘Study From Life’, which, as becomes apparent, is exactly what this image turns out to be. In Hampstead, below, Walters uses double vision, along with a bending of the window horizontal window beams to depict how he thinks we really see. A surprising example of Walters painting in double vision can be seen in the British Pathé clip:- http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=36381
Evan Walters (1893-1951) was, in his lifetime, known for his academic way of portraying minors, and local people of office. But, when he started his studies into double vision his career waned. His story seems a sad and much over-looked one, he really believed in what he was doing, even though most others disregarded his double vision work at the time. Looking back with hindsight, he is a very important artist, who stuck to his guns till the end, and deserves to be taken as seriously as some of the European greats of the time.
Lawrence Gowing, Vanitas, 1979, Oil on Canvas, RA Collection
There are other artists who have followed the same track in their own way, but probably had never heard of Walters, or seen his work. Lawrence Gowing, RA, was ‘…a passionate student of Cézanne’s visual researches’ (Gombrich, 1982, p.181). In Vanitas (1979), we can see the double vision being used, along with a curving of the front edge of the table. Walters did this over forty years before in many of his paintings. In Hampstead Through a Window (1937), we can clearly see the doubling of the window frame, and the horizontals of the window frame seem to bend out towards the viewer in an attempt to capture how we see in a curvilinear way.
John Wonnacott, The Family, 1963-74, Oil on Canvas
Another British painting of interest is The Family, 1963-74, by John Wonnacott. In this painting, everything depicted at the centre of the canvas seems ‘correct’ perspective wise. But, as we look to either end of the painting, things like the mans arm begin to stretch drastically – but, if we maintain focus on the centre of the canvas, and try to ‘see’ the same arm in our peripheral vision, what was a ‘stretched’ arm will now seem in perspective with the rest of the image.
Francis Bacon, Triptych, 1976, Oil on Canvas, each panel 198x147.5cm. Private Collection
While trying to convey his experience of the word directly into the viewers nervous system, Francis Bacon, probably unwittingly (he never mentions it in his interviews with David Sylvester), deals with the phenomena of objects bending and stretching as they become part of peripheral vision in the side of. Here, we see in each side panel, an image of a ‘stretched’ head. But, and this would probably work a lot better in front of the real thing, if we concentrate on the central image of carrion flesh, the heads either side seem to become ‘correct’.
David Hockney, Sitting in the Zen Garden at
The Ryoanji Temple, Kyoto, Feb 18, 1983,
Photomontage Collage, 144.4x116.8cm
Davis Hockney, in his photo-montages has had a go at dealing with the phenomena of seeing. With some of these, he takes the step of putting himself into the image. There is an interesting passage in ‘That’s The Way I see It’, in which Hockney writes,
“We do not look at the world from a distance; we are in it, and that’s how we feel. …I tend to like the thought that I’m in the world. I don’t want to just look through keyholes. So, what I am talking about is the world, and pointing out that there are different ways of depicting space; one way is a keyhole way, essentially the window idea, the one-point perspective. The window is just a big window with edges around it.”
(David Hockney, 1993, p.103)
Hockney tries to break with this ‘keyhole’ way of looking at the world with works that open up the space depicted in his canvases (such as A walk around the hotel courtyard, Acatlan, 1985), but in his photo-maontage, Walking in theZen Garden at the Ryoanji Temple, Feb. 21, 1983, we can see his feet, walking around the bottom of the image. They have been separated from the garden that we are looking at, and he has worn odd socks to show clearly that each foot is ‘stepping’, moving around the garden. I think Hockney added his feet to try to make us, the viewers, think they are our feet while looking at the work as a whole. The ‘backward perspective’ (Hockneys Term), is also an attempt to open out the edges of the image to include the viewer; if we look into the centre of the garden, the edges at the sides of the garden straighten up and become ‘correct’.
Hockney may have been the first painter to deal with the ‘Keyhole’ issue with photography, but Walters, in Boys at Golf, was trying to deal with it thirty-eight years earlier in the medium of paint. If we look towards the left side of the canvas, we can see the ghostly outline of the profile of a face, nose pointing towards the ‘boys at golf’. Walters must have noticed that no matter where we look, the tip of our nose will always be visible to us as an outline. There is also a band running down the centre of the painting, and either side of this band, some things are partly repeated (i.e., the branch of a tree, the red golf flag). I think this band may represent where the lines of sight of his (Walters) individual eyes converge. So, by trying to paint exactly what he sees, Walters puts himself into the image. As we look at this painting, the outline of the face on the left becomes the outline of our faces, and in this way, like what Hockney was doing with his photomontage work, Walters also puts the viewer into the work.
In their various explorations, these artists, Evan Walters being (probably) the first, were trying to get away from the one-point perspective, in a more subtle way than what Cézanne or Picasso did. They were (are, in Hockney’s case) deeply concerned with how vision is depicted, and have all spent a life’s work researching this problem. Each artist featured in this piece has a distinct way of trying to come to terms with vision, which may suggest that there never will or can be one certain, or correct way of depicting vision – all we can do as artists is learn from how it has been done in the past, and try to look even harder.
An exhibition that documents how British artists have try to depict vision would be an exciting and original way of contextualising and celebrating one of Wales’ unsung heroes of art.
Bibliography
Ficacci, Luigi, 2003, Bacon, Taschen, Germany.
Gombrich, E. H., 1982, The Image and The eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representations,Phaidon Press Ltd, Oxford.
Hockney, David, 2004, Hockney’s Pictures, Thames and Hudson, London.
Hockney, David, 1993, That’s The Way I See It, Thames and Hudson, London.
Plummer, Barry, 2011, Evan Walters: Moments of Vision, Seren, Wales (?)
Schmied, Wieland, 1996, Francis Bacon, Prestel, Munich.
British Pathé Wesite, 1937, Evan Walters-Artist: http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=36381
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