James Reed, printer of Milestone Graphics said to me one day, “It’s not about the picture, it’s about the picture plane.” Reed was my printer for many years and as we worked, we often talked about ideas and visual concepts that would come to mind. He told me he had thought of this riddle during a teaching moment at Lyme Academy. As counter intuitive as it sounds, from the point of view of the artist’s actions, it is not about the picture, it is about the picture plane.
The “picture plane” is the surface on which the artist works. It is an epidermis of the entire painting/drawing, bordered by the limits of the frame. Any mark, smudge, or adjustment in one part has an effect on all the other parts. The whole governs the correctness of the part, not the other way around. Artists making paintings/drawings don’t manipulate objects and backgrounds, or negative and positive space, or maneuver mass and weight within the void ever mindful of the forces of gravity as a sculptor might. Paintings/drawings are visual structures of materials, contrasts, shapes, and marks on a two-dimensional surface, and not a collection of objects or a summary of parts.
Arguing that things look as they do in paintings/drawings because they are what they are is simply inadequate to explain drawings and paintings. Even though some drawings and paintings capture verisimilitudes and look like the “real world,” no drawing/painting is a true copy of the real world, because the “real world” is visually changing for every human being, all the time.
Human’s construct different minds in their brains and see different “realities,” and therefore verisimilitude is not an adequate evaluative criterion for paintings/drawings. Meanings belong to individuals.
A painting/drawing is a unique visual world on a surface, and each part is related to every other part in the pictorial structure of the whole, whether the work is historic, modern, contemporary, realistic, or abstract, conventional, or cutting-edge. Although the stimulus (content) engendering the artist’s work may be an object, a subject matter, an idea, an intention, the artist’s actions on the picture plane make a visual organization. The artist negotiates, navigates, and organizes perception (the visual cues) on the picture plane. As Roy Lichtenstein said, “Organized perception is what art is all about.”
Michael Torlen