Essays on Painting

camera is concerned is all grey, it is what a camera regards as optimal viewing.
Your visual span is about 120 or 130 degrees, unless you are using a wideangle
lens a camera’s span only about 40 degrees. That means that if you
see a wonderful view and you take a photo of it, when you get it home you
will probably say “What on earth was that?”
HOW SEEING DEVELOPS
All babies have a set of tasks related to learning to see, they have to master
three separate skills. They have to learn to focus, to reverse the image on
their retina and also learn to correct the curvature of the image. From this
we know that babies need things to educate their eyes from a very early age.
Very occasionally we are able to ask people who have blind from birth
and who have recovered their sight to identify an object. To do so they often
have to close their eyes before they can.
Young children have the gift of complete accommodation and can focus
very closely indeed. You can verify this by noting how close they hold things
to your eyes when they want you to see something. Well it works for them.
You must all remember your own childhood when you closely examined
everything new that you came across.
I distinctly remember the long walk to school for the afternoon session
I dawdled because I knew that if I arrived early I would find that the gates
would be locked. I knew every brick on the way, each one was familiar and
studied in close-up, concentrating purely on the detail.
SEEING AND DRAWING
Children have to make sense of their world, they love models because
they help them to take a godlike view of the world. Toy cars, soldiers, garages,
dolls’ houses, are always first encountered as models on a small scale. It
is not surprising therefore that people taking up drawing later in life think
of houses from a top view and frequently get the roof angles wrong when
they are drawing buildings. Children will draw tall towers and draw them
as if they could see the top surface, perhaps because they learnt about everything
from models.
A child's point of view, a picnic, the view is chosen to show the most
typical view of the particular object, (difficult to show foreshortening of
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