E-F-E-F-D-E-F-E-C-E-F, etc., etc. Click on image to view the QuickTime movie.

"Same" face, but what different tunes!

If you reflect on this for a while, you may come to realize that this world we see is (almost) never seen as immediately self-given, it is (almost) always constituted by --and the product of -- our projects, it is a "seen-as-intended world."

In other words, it is never experienced as a "world in itself," an "objective world," it is always constituted by the subject ("me") "under the influence" of his/her ("my") deep intentions and projects. The product of our naive perception has even been called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness" because it is invested with a "reality status" anchored in its taken-for-granted "being," while our reality is truly one of constant "becoming."

Trained Perception
Our experience of visible reality is most often made of "illusions," illusions we create and become attached to, over and against the possibility of getting a glimpse of "the appearing as it appears."

To reiterate, the lines between madness, creativity and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness are very thin indeed. (Foucault's Madness and Civilization is another book I highly recommend.) Madness is almost always defined in social terms, and often traced to alternate ways of constituting "the real," while these alternate ways of constituting "the real" are very much at the core of what artists are searching for and working from.

If these alternate differentiations are relatively safe and "mild," we believe we have "an artist!" If they are destructive and powerful, we trust we have a "nut case" (or a new world leader!).

Try as hard as you can, you can never take yourself as a (the) viewer out of the equation. We are subjective beings, through and through.

I feel we need to spend more time with this: far too many of my students would come into the studio totally convinced that there was an "objective world out there," often believed to be the same for everybody. The common belief is that working from the visible simply requires one to pay attention to "what is," understand how "it" is made, learn how "it" works, then simply draw accordingly.