Multiple Viewpoints.

In the chapter on multiple viewpoints, Bird addresses a key factor in the break from traditional, academic art. Typically in history, art had been about reproducing realism in the most tromp l'oeil way possible. A trained artist could recreate an image perfectly to fool the viewer into thinking the scene in front of them was possibly a real vision. Artists therefore depended on single linear point perspective. To break tradition, an artist had to break the single perspective. But did the viewer really lose a sense of realism because of it? Artists like Cezanne, Braque, and Picasso experimented with brushwork, color, space, and viewpoints to create a different kind of realism. Instead of exhibiting perfect visual realism from a single viewpoint, they created the realistic experience of atmosphere.

This is a great question: How does one create atmosphere? How does one create art that shows presence? To make the viewer feel an experience? Most academic artists had the approach to fool them visually via single perspective. But in reality, when are we ever still, looking at a single point? Ironically, it tends to be when we are looking at art. In daily life people are moving all of the time, even if it just changing the angle of their head or direction of their glace. So, how do we as humans really experience things? We are in constant motion, even with just our eyes, and rely on other senses as well. Cognitively we take in the "gist" of things, and it is rare that we have a very specific, narrow focus. This is the state of mind that becomes difficult to produce, when a person is taking in the "gist" of their surroundings: What is all around them, the mood, the feeling, the space evoked from their experience.

Therefore I would like to feel comfortable breaking away from total realism as the Cubists did in order to convey an ever changing moment and express non-tangible senses. This can be done through haze, a blending of space, experiments of color, and the blurring of contours and mark making. It is also easily done in the world of photography, where one must move the camera to multiple viewpoints in order to mimic the movements of humans and their eyes. Photography is a great practical way to make oneself shoot images from multiple viewpoints, and often helps you come up with a better composition than your first choice. While the other ideas of blurriness, color, and disruption of a sense of space can be incorporated into photos as well while shooting through camera adjustments; and in post-production through digital or hand manipulation. I would like to try some of these manipulations in my photos to launch them towards surrealism instead of just realism.