More on ways of seeing

This is still a work in process, though coming towards a conclusion. I have started towards quilting the three layers together... for next post.

The creative process, once begun, comes into full bloom only when it is ready. And in the meantime, other ideas are forming buds and blossoms, waiting their turn but seeking attention, nurturing in both thought and form. Several other works have been gestating as I continue to bring the last quilt into final manifestation - though I often wonder if that happens. I'm want to hang it on the wall, and yet I can't seem to bring myself to let it come to completion. I'm referring to the quilt that I cannot even name yet - though ideas for the narrative it wants to share keep surfacing!

In order to construct that narrative visually, there is another need: to consider perspectives with regard to the fabric placement, and how they will tell their story. Will it have an aerial viewing point, as in many Indigenous works of the dot painting genre; or vertical/horizontal  layered perspective – taking eye to move up and down and across? Or both? Is there to be a focal point, or several? David Hockney used a technique that he called 'joiners', based on the premise that singular and unified optical vision comes about through joining a series of multiple perceptions that come together to create the unified whole of normal vision.

Hockney’s ‘joiners’ aim to create an image able to show reality as we experience it – in fragments, rather than as a completed whole, but as part of the passage of time. It is brought about by collage, using two or several separate images of a single scene by overlapping them or forming a geometric grid. As a composite of a single scene, the image nevertheless has a single narrative that is not static, but engages a roving eye that darts from one area to another. The effect is to alter the usual ‘realism’ that creates the illusion of depth of field. And the aim of his joiners is to reflect the real process of seeing, one based on visual experience as the eye moves across multiple plains, having fluid and multiple viewing points. Unlike the perspective that arrives at the destiny of the vanishing point, the eye moves around, back from the point on the horizon towards the multitudes of vision closer to the viewer, taking her in as a participator as the viewpoint shifts.

Hockney's Bigger Grand Canyon in the collection of the Australian National Gallery is a notable example of his joiners, being made up of 60 canvases joined to create a work of 7.4 metres in width. It uses a reverse perspective to draw the viewer into the environment being depicted, rather than looking in from the outside. This form of ‘reverse perspective’ creates a viewing point, one that draws the viewer into the scene that has been achieved in traditional Chinese art by using the diagonal to cut across the distance perspective attained in Western realism art. His fascinating work on the use of linear perspective is Secret Knowledge: rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters (2001, Thames and Hudson), detailing the use of optical devices over the centuries during the Renaissance to create photographic images for patrons in particular. 

 

Here some focus to the narrative has occurred with the appearance of the Sun and Moon.