Inside The Mind of The Viewer

The big question is how do we get and keep the viewer’s attention?  For a painting to compete against the world of sensations it must be isolated.  Put it in frame, put it on a blank wall, reduce background noise and you’re ready to pay attention to a painting.  Put the same painting in a crowded subway car replete with noise, a burning smell,  and  an arguing couple then, a painting becomes peripheral background material, unimportant. Once the painting is isolated it can begin to spark ideas.  But,  what do we put in the painting  to attract attention? We have long known that data, information, by itself excites nothing within us. We must couple information to emotion. The greater the emotional response the greater the retention in the mind up to the point of catastrophic emotion (when other mechanisms takeover to prevent mental collapse.)  We know too that clarity and legibility can help simplify information but, for a painting to be retained by memory requires emotion and, emotion responds to  the antithesis of clarity and legibility. Emotion responds to mystery and ambiguity. Imagine a theater in your viewer’s head as Eric Kandel suggests.  How is this theater conjured? What does the viewer look for? How does the viewer sustain attention?  How does the viewer see space? see an object in motion  and remember or forget it? The answer lies in understanding how the viewer feels, how the viewer makes images memorable. Because, if the image is memorable it means it is also meaningful (adored or feared).  Artists appeal to memory, to create and recreate memory.  Our memories are mutable. Ambiguity encourages mutable memories.  All of our memories  change in time .  A painting offers a tableau of ambiguity , a place to receive different hypotheses, stir a variety of emotions, a source for  encouraging  the  mutation and evolution of memory. As artists we enter the theater of the mind of the viewer. We need to understand what directs and holds his attention. From neuroscience, cognitive psychology  and the history of art we have some good ideas of how attention that is captured.  Today, we better understand how images of emotional power can be presented and absorbed.   But, the first problem is still initially capturing the viewer’s attention. There is so  much competition for theater of the mind of the viewer, sex, food, diverting pleasures, disturbing anxieties.    Just as a loud noise and a strong odor  stop  and capture our attention   a painting can also stop us with a vivid presentation, with vivid contrast.  The painting must use devices to attract and hold attention. It can be begin by persuasively  and theatrically suggesting  space and motion. And, theatricality is born from exaggeration.

Below are a series of images of deep space. The theater is the feeling of space, infinity,  propelled by complementary contrasting color relationships, dissolving acuity, and design motifs that cause us to look and hypothesize a condition of deep vibrating space.  The following images rely on  design motifs such as the triangle laid in a foreshortened pattern with the tip being both the top and the back, the “S” curve with the “S” presented in various guises of foreshortening and serving as a glue between disparate  sections of the design, the tilted picture plane  provokes an emotional vertiginous response, the use of color  escaping  boundaries or edges to helps unify the visual field and evokes an atmosphere  of space.

Example 1,Manhattan Matrix,(40×60) before superimposing space inducing gridwork and complementary red/orange.

Example2. Manhattan Matrix after additions and changes with amplified sense of color and value contrast and a more layered sense of deeper space.

Example 3, NYC,Across Manhattan, before changes, 48×48

Example 3a, NYC, Across Manhattan, after changes of greater color and value contrast, atmospheric blurring of edges and localizing light area. Notice the size and darkness of the foreground  have increased to move the sense of space to the top ( back ) of the picture.

Example 4. Manhattan pressed between the wavy triangle of the Hudson and East River. The design here moves from darker and more saturated color to lighter and less saturated color along a wavy triangle.