Advantage or Handicap?
 

I asked this question in reponse to a conversation that was going around a portrait critique, however, prompting from a friend suggested I post it here as it might get lost where it is.

Do you think that a person with only one eye would have a perspective advantage in painting, or a handicap? I know William Whitaker talked about having really bad vision in one eye, yet his paintings are beautiful. I think there was a Master or two with really bad vision too...but don't recall which. What do you think? Maybe I should have made this a poll...advantage or disadvantage?

Well, hi Marta, what a fun question.

If were a betting woman (I'm not), I'd say the absense of depth perception is a greater handicap in working from life...when working from photos,you are really just trying to translate values and shapes of colors from one two-dimensional place to another, as the photo is generally quite useless in determining realtive depth.

In both situations though, it's the painter who has to make ultimate decisions about edges, values and saturation, in order to create the illusion of depth.

Chris

I'm having some trouble with your question. Having known and lived with people with limited vision or colored blindness I have not met anyone who thought that somehow there was any advantage with this limitation in any occupation.

In any event I strongly recommend, if you have any choice, keeping both eyes. To the best of my knowledge nothing is gained by viewing or working with one eye. Otherwise what constructive argument exists for using one eye when armed with two?

Why the question?

Hi Jim,
The question sort of formed in my mind as I read through different posts talking about squinting or closing one eye to get better perspective on something. I'm sure we have all seen the demonstration where the artist is holding a brush at arms length, one eye closed, taking measurements. I just wondered if this would then be an advantage to someone with a single, or poor sight problem. Perhaps only someone who has truly been in both positions as an artist would know. I didn't mean we should all turn Van Gogh and go poke an eye out if it gave us an advantage as artists. I know it sounds like a bizarre question, however, to some of us poor sighted people it has some interest, maybe even a little looking at your "glass half full" instead of "glass half empty" kind of thing.

Thank you Chris, for taking it as a "fun" question. Of course you're right, the technical skills of the artist would play the biggest role in the quality of the painting.

Be sure to check out Steven Sweeney's approach to this on my abandoned post...I believe he is developing an "Artists Perspective Eyepatch." How soon can we pick these up at Dick Blick, Steven?

I have had poor vision since birth. According to my eye doctor, my left eye is "legally blind." The left eye also tends to read less color than the right eye. My right eye does all the work, but I must wear glasses to read or paint.

Since one eye doesn't work very well, I have been told that I do not have good depth perception...but I am a good driver.

I have a friend who has a similar problem. She is a wonderful artist and you'd never know that there was anything wrong with her eyes from viewing her work. She thinks we have a design advantage because we don't get confused by depth.

I also remember having a similar discussion with a couple of (essentially one-eyed) classmates long ago in art school.

I am so often amazed at how easily (I think) I see so darn many things with one poor eye that many can't see with two good ones....go figure....

I think that you could be on to something here Marta :).

Marta --

The practices you refer to -- closing one eye when measuring, and squinting -- have, I think, little to do with judging perspective. Closing one eye when measuring is similar to closing one eye when targeting through gunsights or aiming a drawn arrow at a target. It temporarily shuts down the binocular vision so that you can get a linear view from eye to subject directly through your measuring device, whether gunsight or thumb-gauge on a brush handle. Interestingly, most of us have a dominant eye and it isn't necessarily the same side as our dominant hand, and that affects which eye we close when taking such readings.

As for squinting -- one of the most useful and oft-forgotten tools of art -- that also is a practice that has nothing to do with perspective but is used to simplify value shapes, to help neutralize the noise of detail and let you see an overall big picture of more unified value shapes. (By the way, when you squint, all the values look darker, so don't draw or paint them as dark as you see them while you're squinting.)

I vote for two eyes. I've already lost most of the hearing in one ear. If an eye goes, too, I'd be listing pretty severely to starboard and sailing in circles. (Hey! . . . nah, that couldnt' explain it. I still have good vision. Must be something else.)

The Artist's Perspective Eyepatches are in market testing right now. I'll have to await results to see whether to scale up production.

Cheers,
Steven

Then again, if you're Third Eye Blind, you could start a band.

Assuming that the discussion is not about sensitivity, perception, awareness, what can be seen more clearly by one eye more so than by two? It would seem very difficult for a person of limited vision to make that judgement/comparison. I was/am always pleased to know that friends,associates, and relatives (my son) coped well with limitations and knew some highly regarded designers who did not find it a drawback. None, however, claimed an atvantage.

What does "confused by depth" mean as it might relate to design/painting?

I do have an open mind though and if it is somehow shown to be an advantage to paint with one eye I am comforted knowing that I my be able to buy a "Stevie Wonder Eyepatch."

I honestly don't know. Since I have no way to compare, some two-eyed person will have to wear Steven's hot new eye-fashion statement for a day and let us know the difference in perception.

As to an "advantage" - I am only reporting. Frankly, I'd like to try 20/20 for a day or so...I might prefer it.

Anyhow, I have never felt disadvantaged.

Hi, all,

Well, of course, two eyes are better than one. And yes, it is essential to use only one eye when measuring from the model...but that is about likeness, not depth.

I have a very dear friend, a portrait painter, who recently had cataract surgery on both eyes (yes, in her 40's). It has been very interesting to hear how her visual adjustment has affected her painting. She continues to paint beautiful paintings, yet she, I think, has expanded the way she views them.

Chris

"Closing one eye & squinting the other"
 

I was only joking when I posted a statement about advising my viewers of my artwork to "close one eye and squint the other because that is what I did when I drew it." I don't know if my statement started this ball rolling. If it did, my apologies for a joke gone awry.

To tell you the truth, I do sometimes squint when doing creative drawing, to somehow block out what I have done and imagine what I want to do. But, I don't really recommend it at all for any particular advantage or useful purpose in any way shape or form. Two eyes are better than one. I have just been doing this stuff for so long that I have a plethera of bad jokes for any drawing occasion.

Lon

Gosh, don't apologize Lon. I think that this is, at least for me and Marta (who started the whole thing), a subject that we are really curious about :).

If you are uncomfortable that I confessed that I only have one functioning eye....don't be. I honestly don't give a damm that I am this way (especially because I never really wanted to be a Navy pilot anyhow) :cool:.

Besides, I squint too...it helps sometimes.

I vote for 2 eyes too. However, one of mine got replaced by a very strange sense of humor I'm afraid. Having one eye is not as bad as it may seem. I only have to buy one contact lens. Cheaper on Mascara. And I can often fall asleep at a boring seminar and look wide awake!

I have often had the sensation that I am seeing things better in some ways now. Although it took some getting used to, I also am a very good driver. Don't, however stand on my right, because if I am talking, I might accidently slap you as I am a "talk with my hands" person.

Lon, you were only joking, but there was an element of truth in your statement. Sorry if I got carried away on a subject I found interesting. Thanks to everyone for their comments.

One last note on one-eyed viewing, and that relates to sight-size drawing (so I'll duplicate this "over there"). In order to view your subject "through" the plumb lines, you're going to have to close one eye. Because one eye is dominant (it may or may not be the one you decide to close), it's important to always close the same eye when you take your measurements. Don't switch back and forth. One of my instructor's first questons when beginning a drawing critique was always, "Which eye are you looking with?, because he'd do the same in order to assess my accuracy.

Incidentally, if you want to know which is your dominant eye, pick out an object across the room and hold out your arm with index finger raised and sight "through" the finger to the object, with BOTH EYES open. If, when you close your left eye, the relative positions of the finger and object stay about the same, your right eye is dominant. Keep the left eye open and close the right, and the finger "moves" some distance to the right of the object. The opposite effects with left-eye dominance. In a non-art context in which this really "matters", if you're trap shooting and you hold the shotgun on the right but you're left-eye dominant, you'll swear your aim is perfect but the clay pigeon will just fly away unharmed. Switch to the left side and you'll probably have much higher percentages.

Finally, this is important to know because the "'Artist's Perspective' Eyepatch" is to be worn over the nondominant eye.

Finis

Okay, okay, I have remained silent on this "'Artist's Perspective Eyepatch", but the time has come to come out.

I teach an advanced 3/4 oil portrait workshop. The idea is to work for 10 days on one model. I don't teach sight sizing in my workshops, I teach a variation of it that I call "brush sizing". Instead of placing and drawing the model exactly the size you see, an additional ratio calculation is done to enable you to draw the model any size you wish. In a 3/4 figure, you measure the model in "heads". A typical seated figure might be 5 1/2 heads down and 3 heads across.

My students make a grid of acetate with lines drawn an inch apart. This is suspended from a stand, and the artist stands in such a way that when he/she looks through the grid, the model's head fills one head box. The canvas is similarly gridded out, except the boxes on the canvas might be 7 inches instead of 1 inch. From the viewing stand, the artist determines what part of the anatomy is in each of the boxes, and transfers that information to the canvas boxes. When it comes time to place the features on the head, for more accurate small measurements, the artist reverts back to the "brush sizing" I taught in an earlier class. (Might I say this? I can think of no better way to draw in a dead-on correct figure in the shortest amount of time than this gridded technique....)

(Whew...)

The point to this is....the students are squinting through one eye for the better part of a day, the length of time it takes to do the gridded cartoon....and we wear eye patches. It started with the fatigue of closing one eye for such a long period. Some of the students began to make piecemeal eye pieces, taping black swatches to their eyes, or blocking off one eye glass piece. Finally, we went to the pharmacy and purchased a peck of peeper protectors.

Peggy

Sure, Peggy, try to trump my patent history. I hope you've kept good notes. I'm exercising artistic license to create my own, "even as we speak", with remarkably realistic dating. Be afraid.

I hope to be able to buy my very own "Steven Sweeny/SOG" logo brand eye patch at the upcoming ASOPA show. Maybe they'll become trendy fashion accessories like the blue hats the American athletes wore at the Salt Lake City Olympics!

I have heard that brown eyes are dominant, which is a factor to me, because I have one brown eye and one blue eye! (Which really relates to nothing said on this string, but is nearly as important as most of the above.) ;)

I suspect that many people "see" but they do not "observe" (if you get my drift).

Lon, do many people notice that you have one blue eye and one brown eye? I have never seen this before....but it could be that I am just never awake enough to observe it. How common is this?

Very rare
 

They used to notice, but not much anymore. You see, since I have gotten older, I squint.

See the problem here?
 

Who would know!

:cool: Cool! LOL:) :D ;) :oops: :cool:

Lon, for this work I would try and smooth out some of those wrinkles under the eyes and trim that brow on our right. Do you have a photo ref.?

Nice composition, just eyes, long horizontal canvas!

An artist in my area does big canvases of just closeups of parts of faces. He wants to see how small an area of a face he can paint to communicate the likeness.

As long as we're on weird eye stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with art, I have to tell my story. My oldest daughter has part of one pupil missing. A pie shaped piece, about 1/6th of the pupil isn't there, and the iris extends into the spot. I can tell you I was one freaked out mama when I noticed that on my newborn baby! It hasn't affected her eyesight. One kid told her she had a "Pac Man" eye.

I have NEVER had the opportunity to paint someone with "interestingly different" eyes. Dang. I'm gonna keep my fingers crossed that I get a subject like Lon or Debra's daughter someday!

I will have to sell a few dozen oil portraits so I can to commission you, Karin!

Well
 

I was just sent to this thread as I had started one that was very like this one. I got to say if we paint sight size like Sargent from 30' (making the match-or judging the work next to the subject) then we have to use both eyes. Here's the deal. You can't expect the people looking at your work to close one eye.

Your painting is attempting to match what's next to it, by doing so you create wonderful depth and light. At 30' or 40' you can see the big forms and the soft edges in the round-if you open both eyes. There really should be no agruement over this if one is devoted to sight-size working from life. By the way Sargent's sight wasn't great anfd he chose not to wear glasses for his 40/20 vision so as to keep the edges soft.

Gun sights are different because the depth of field is very "close" and involves focusung here (the sights) and there the target. Sorry for the rant, practice has taught me this to be so.

I'm not sure anyone has suggested this, Tim, though it's admittedly been a long time since I've read back through this thread. But your reference to gun sights is most instructive, because when I'm doing the measuring for sight-size work, I'm "sighting" through my plumb line (or brush handle or calipers or whatever is preferred) held at arms length. If I don't close one eye, binocular vision prevents me from focusing at such close range on both the plumb line and the object in nature at the same time, which defeats the whole purpose.

Now once the measuring is done, once I no longer need to sight "through" the plumb line, then sure, there's no need any longer to close one eye. Then a different way of seeing takes over, essentially memory work. I look with both eyes at the object in nature, hold that image in memory, then look at my drawing or painting (which should be positioned in the same field of vision as the object in nature) to see if it "matches", and to the extent that it doesn't, and to the extent that the difference is important to me, I make corrections. I do all this with both eyes open (unless I need to squint to see value shapes!!), just as I would expect a viewer to approach the piece.

I think David Bowie has different coloured eyes.

The dominant eye technique is very interesting. I often close one eye when drawing but I never actively realized that there was a dominant effect. I expected that the image would be centred. Explains why I am such a poor shot.

Binary
 

We have binary vision to help us read depth, movement, form..it's pointless to deny this in our painting. Closing one eye either has an effect on what we see (the subject) or it's a waste of time. The effect it must have is to flatten out the subject. So, if we completely suceed in nailing the subject then we capture a flatter image and get quite naturally a flatter painting.

I don't see why we would want that. It's the roundness of artists like Sargent and Hals that separate their work from someone like T. Eakins who loved the one-eyed camera. (I have never seen one color sketch of his done to use with the photos.)

Fortunately, everyone is free to have a go at whatever methodology works for them, and let the results speak for themselves. My own methodology is exactly as I've detailed, and it produces anything but flat paintings. It has to do with initial measurements and placement, with making assessments about relative positions of reference points, and nothing to do with depth, form or movement. That was the point of my second paragraph.

Memory
 

What does memory have to do with seeing (from nature)?

Everything or nothing, depending on the enquiry and its intent.

I'll try to pull a hurdle off the track before anyone feels challenged to jump it, or raise it, in the interest of semantics. The whole point of accurately and sensitively "seeing" an object in nature is -- not for the window shopper, no, but for the artist, yes -- to transfer the impressions from that activity or exercise onto paper or canvas or scratchboard, into clay or plaster or marble. If we're "just looking" and no more, then memory has no useful role to play. If we wish to capture the visual impressions we've sensed from our encounter with the objects in nature, so that we can turn and replicate those impressions with some degree of integrity and accuracy, we are necessarily using memory -- in this case, short-term memory.

(The point here isn't at all about long-term memory, or recollections, or imagining birth experiences or such things. Long-term memory is clouded with all manner of interpretation, preconception, cultural molding, and both loss and creation of details. The issue here is NOT "memory vs. observation". The dynamic in play is observation, recording of the visual data, and transfer of that information to the artist's working surface or material. And that transfer absolutely requires the operation of memory, albeit short-term.)

"Memory training," "memory exercises," "memory work" -- however labeled -- is a staple of rigorous training in drawing, particularly figure drawing. It often takes the form of simply viewing, say, irregular polygons for 30 seconds, putting the sample away, and trying to immediately recreate it from memory. First efforts are usually discouraging, but the facility develops quite rapidly, and soon the student artist gains confidence in his or her ability to see an object in nature -- to pay attention to it, to make spatial and relational judgments as between its parts -- and to quickly turn attention to the easel or armature and replicate the information just captured in memory. There's no other way to make that transfer, short of projectors or other mechanical or optical devices that leave the artist out of the process.

Later memory training might involve viewing a model in the life room for, say, three minutes, then having that model leave the stand, whereupon the students are challenged to draw or paint what they've just observed. Another exercise is to view a color sample for one minute, put it away and try to accurately replicate the hue and value of that sample on your canvas. Over time, the sample and your efforts will become closer and closer to a match, which will mean that more and more of what you put down on the paper or canvas, whether in the studio or in the field, will be accurate the first time.

That's kind of a short version of an answer that could go on endlessly (and I'm the guy to do that!). Aristotle was trying to get at the nature of memory quite a long time ago (I forget exactly how long ago), so interest in the psychophysiological processes has been keen for a while.

I'm admittedly at a loss to quite understand the thesis or objection in opposition to this. I don't know how else the human artist collects and transfers visual information other than through the memory processes.

I'm late to the vocation and not altogether familiar with Eakins' failings, but in researching another matter I was reminded that the Art Students League's famous instructor, Robert Beverly Hale, chose some of Eakins' work to illustrate his master class figure drawing lessons, which suffer from no dearth of roundness or form.

It was a highlight of my young and I suppose pruriently energized introduction to art, to read Hale's commentary, a sidebar to Eakins' drawing, on "The Breast -- Front View":

"[Y]ou should always place the breasts so that they look this way and that way. This one is looking up at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and this one is looking to the police precinct on 58th Street. That's the way they ought to be placed -- church and state. Do not let them look straight ahead."

Hi Tim,

From my understanding, photography became a more important tool to Eakins when the Pennslyvania Academy of Art (where he taught) forbade him from having his students model for each other. He then went "off campus" (camera as a medium to capture form in nature) for preliminary studies. Because of his passionate work from the human form, he was in fact fired, amid rumors of incest and bestiality. Source: Thomas Eakins, ed. by Darrel Sewell, Yale University Press.

I've always seen Eakins as a true naturalist, insisting on life classes, even anatomical dissection.

Umm
 

Steven,

you're a bright guy and a good writer, I enjoy reading what you have to say even when I don't agree.

Hugs,
Tim