League

how to see
what to see
Movement and Mindfulness
Figure 1
20 LINES from the League
Nicki Orbach
Viewing art and creating
art involves you as a whole
person, not just a disembodied
eye. Both involve a
type of self-awareness that
encompasses conscious
and preconscious attention,
intuition, a kinesthetic sensibility,
and an awareness of
the experience in the present
moment. How we think,
feel, and experience the
world influences the way we
see and paint.
This world is filled with objects to which
we apply names. The ability to categorize
helps us to make instantaneous decisions,
since we don’t
have to figure
out each individual
visual
experience
every time we
encounter it.
We know what
to expect.
However, when
we view art,
seeing within
categories can
be limiting and
actually obscure
what is seen. As Paul Valery says, “to
see is to forget the name of the thing one
sees.” We are looking at things through a
bias of names and the preconceptions that
attend to those names. We actually don’t
see things as they really are. One
skill that is helpful when looking
at a painting is to first just look,
without using words. Then add
meaning or a narrative later. Art
critic Roberta Smith says, “I learn
from everything I look at, good,
bad, or indifferent. I follow my eye
reflexively; if it is drawn toward
something, I pay attention and
try to find out why. You train your
eye, build up a mental image bank,
and constantly try to pinpoint why
some things are convincing and
others aren’t.”
Figure 2
Viewing a scene involves sensory,
cognitive, and motor processes. Seeing is
action. There is only a small portion of the
retina, the fovea, where we see things in
sharp focus. Figure 1 illustrates what we
can make out in the visual scene if we fix
our eyes on the woman’s face. Her face
would be in sharp focus but as things get
farther away, they get harder to make out
and the colors are grayer. This part of the
visual scene is in our peripheral vision.
We fix on something in the environment
to see it clearly, and then our eyes move
to the next point of fixation in order to
see that part in sharp focus. This allows
different parts of the visual field to appear
on the fovea over time. Alfred L. Yarbus
performed a number of experiments in
1965 pertaining to eye movements using
Ilya Repin’s painting The Unexpected
Visitor (Figure 2). He asked his subjects to
just look at the painting, and he recorded
Figure 3