Learning to See

...There can be no doubt that we penetrate a work of art mainly with that emotional equipment we call feeling...

...We are not taught really to look...

...Without it, the excitement that the artist tries to generate by optical means can never be echoed in the viewer's mind—or heart...

...Let us not forget that non-figurative art timidly began only six decades ago, and that in those decades most of the celebrated masters, Picasso included, never quite abandoned identifiable subject matter...

...By the same token, a painter cannot communicate his message to us, if we do not understand the vocabulary, the syntax of his visual idiom...

...This is true of the earliest of the illustrated pictures—details from a leaf of a British Twelfth Century Psalter—no less than of the constructions by an English lady of our time, the Op artist, Bridget Riley...

...Our schools train us to use our eyes to glean useful information rather than to be organs of pleasure...

...One technique will yield results different from another...

...Nevertheless, we must not underestimate the importance of intellect as a guide through the often murky waters of sentiment...

...At most, we are required—by the superficial notion of culture—to identify title, date, general style of a picture, and its maker's name...

...It refers equally to Russian icons, and to products of Indian, Japanese, or Middle Eastern art...

...Hence, even educated people visit galleries and museums only reluctantly, or not at all, and generally feel ill at ease in buildings filled with pictures (or sculptures, for that matter...

...Peter Owen, a rare combination of practicing artist and scholar, does not make this mistake...

...if it were irrelevant, thousands of painters in the course of history would not have depicted saints, women, children, animals, flowers, cities, landscapes, and historical or allegorical scenes...

...But "form" to Owen, and to every other serious lover of art, is not something that can be achieved by mere skill— as in the way a circus performer perfects a difficult stunt, or even the way a potter or weaver develops and refines his techniques...

...All the same, the spectator misses a great deal if he is unaware of the formal, "abstract" qualities in a picture, even in the accurate portrait of a well-known personage...

...We must, Owen warns us in Painting, develop the capacity to note the deliberate interplay of lines, tones, colors, and textures in order to see, completely, the shapes presented by the artist...

...But Owen does not meekly accept this sorry state of affairs...

...The form is what gives to each picture its individual character," runs a pivotal sentence in the book...

...His book has a practical purpose: to train man's power of appreciation by increasing his theoretical knowledge—by making the reader see, the way a musicologist would make him hear music as something more and better than a random sequence of noises...

...Reviewed by Alfred Werner Picasso was almost right in condemning the desire to understand art: "Why not try to understand the song of a bird...

...This applies to artists of all age groups—Owen pointedly reproduces the work of a four-year-old child—and of all periods...

...Owen writes that once the purely visual elements of a picture have become familiar, the worst obstacles have been removed: ". . . by heightening our sensitivity to these forces and by developing an awareness of their expressive relationships within the picture frame, we allow both the painting of today and that of a thousand years ago to communicate with us...

...In paintings, too, one kind of pattern is played against another, often in a more rational system than the layman is inclined to believe...

...No set of rules can help an artist become a master of form, nor give the viewer a quick and easy primer to spot it, or its always deplorable absence...

...Painting offers the unhurried, patient reader a good introduction to the world that the artist inhabits and that he shapes by fascinating effects of light, space, movement—effects to be recognized as so many inviting portals leading to the inner sanctum rather than as tricks designed to disturb or confuse...

...What children often experience—an appreciation of the sheer physical quality of a picture—is usually allowed to wither away, to die in the adult...

...An artist consciously selects the medium best suited to a particular theme...

...Hence, Owen believes the educated viewer will get far more satisfaction from a picture than the naive one who looks only for the subject or story, and is completely lost if there is neither...

...He is aware that even the most sensitive reader does not do justice to a Spanish poem without knowing the language...

...After all, form always exists in a different manner, for a Renaissance artist like Paolo Veronese, as well as for a "drip" artist like Jackson Pollock...

...the choice of general shape, of dimensions, is influenced by rational processes...

...But Owen is also opposed to those "purists" who maintain that the subject matter, the theme, is totally unimportant...