The Subjectivity of Vision, or What Happened When I Got Glasses

So I Got Glasses

Last month I got glasses for the first time. A light prescription for distance vision, but still. Of course, I’m now able to see more clearly at a distance. Its been something of a revelation, and has had me thinking a lot about vision, subjective experience, and what we want our paintings to represent. Why? Well, things aren’t just clearer. It’s more than that… Color is different. Edges too. Value contrast is different. Putting the glasses on is like wearing someone else’s eyes.

The first thing that became obvious is that there is a slight shift in hue when wearing the glasses. I got glasses that have an anti-reflective coating. Not polarized, just anti-reflective… like museum glass for a painting, but instead for my wee little eyes. ;P My wife said she wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t mentioned it, but I see it- very definitely, the glasses make everything gently warmer. The mauves in the shadows of distant greens are gone. They’re browner. A blue-grey street is a warm grey. A powder blue far away hazy cloud is more a neutral grey. Each item in of itself seems similar in hue but gently shifted, yet, as a whole, scenes are sunnier, more orange, with far less blues.

Even more powerful is the change in edge and value contrast. Just as I had heard told to me, far away trees have lots of tiny leaves again! Hahaha! Objects 20’ away from me have sharp, well defined edges too. In and of itself, this doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but the harder edges also seem to make contrast more powerful. Do shadows seem darker because I’m not optically “mixing” the light and dark sides of objects anymore with my blurred vision? It would appear so.

So, to summarize- warmer hues, sharper edges, darker shadows, higher contrast. Far away shapes that I saw as unified forms (trees, mountains) are broken into many small, tiny (but interesting) forms. That’s a lot for an artist to handle!

What’s the Big Deal?

I have, on some level, a desire when painting to be true to what I see in nature. Perhaps it’s driven by some desire to connect. Painting can be a vehicle for connection to the outside world, a method of paying attention. To me, that’s clearly part of the pleasure and practice of plein air work. What color are those shadows? What comparative value this trunk? How soft those distant hills? We pay attention to the outside world, and through it we learn.

The weird part is to ask, “Which version of the world is the real one- what I see with glasses or without them?”

Should I paint wearing my glasses, or not? Is what I see when I put my glasses on an “untrue” version of the world, because the glasses are, literally, a lens between my eyes and the world, shifting and changing things? Or is what I see without the glasses “untrue”, because my aging and unclear eyes are creating an altered optical experience? Does the difference even matter? Aren’t we always subjective anyways?

If the idea that we’re trying to objectively transfer the world down onto our canvas is a gentle sort of fiction, then what are we actually recording? What am I really after when I paint? What sacred thing am I paying attention to, if the color of a leaf at sunrise is now up for debate?

We Are Painting the Mind

Of course, the outside world still exists, even if we are experiencing it subjectively. And if I grab a chair, so can you. We share it. The mind is relating to real things. I think it is that transit that is important. That sense of something going back and forth between those sacred things we paint and ourselves, that tenuous attentive connection, is the real deal.

Perhaps, as artists, we should really be paying more attention to how we experience things, holistically, and how we want to represent that, and less about how we think “things are”. I currently feel this way. When we put paint on the paper, we are not putting down the world, but rather our experience of it. The outside world is funneled through our eyes, through our sense of smell, through what we hear and touch, and through them it travels to our mind, where it goes through a kind of alchemy, is consolidated, given a hierarchy of importance and meaning. Value. We are myth-making, and that makes me feel free to paint as I see fit. To adjust as I see fit to express an experience. To make the painting agree with something hidden, on the inside.

We are painting our mind, vibrating in accord with what is on the outside.