WHAT VANISHING POINT? SOME REALLY BRIEF THOUGHTS ON COMICS AND PERSPECTIVE
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
David Hockney argues that the use of optical lenses probably had something to do with the widespread the 15th century method of perspective:
…the [optical] projection yields up one-point perspective–and nothing else does. It’s difficult nowadays, in a world saturated with television and photographs and billboards and movies, to recall how radically new one-point perspective would have appeared to those first exposed to it. That’s not how the world presents itself and can’t help but present itself through a one-point projection, be it a pinhole or a lens or a curved mirror.”
We see with two eyes. It’s called “binocular vision.” Each eye receives a slightly different image, and the brain processes the two images into 3-D to generate the sensation of depth.
Western one-point perspective is an attempt to fabricate this sensation. It is an illusion. Hockney calls it “the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops.”
And when it comes to comics, some of my favorite artists choose to completely ignore it.
Here’s Scott McCloud from Making Comics:
Dig this funky Grosz. See a vanishing point?
What about this Ron Rege?
Death to tyrannical one-point linear perspective!
May 30th, 2007 at 11:46 am
Isn’t one-, two- and three-point perspective more a function of what angle the image is drawn at than how the image is recorded? You use one-point perspective when you’re drawing something end-on, two-point when it’s at a ground-level angle, and three-point when it’s from an elevation.
Basically, any series of parallel lines which are not parallel to the viewing plane will, at a certain point, converge to a particular point of perspective. It has nothing to do with the fact there are two eyes or simple lenses or whatever. Also, the lens itself has nothing to do with perspective either (though I can see Hockney’s point that the emergence of optical lenses may have been a factor behind artists striving for more precision in their conveyance of depth).
May 30th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
The point is that you don’t have to use perspective at all, really, to draw things. One-point, two-point, three-point perspective are all drawing METHODS. What I’m interested in is the fact that many contemporary comics artists choose to completely ignore Western perspective methods, and go for the alternative ways of showing depth that McCloud outlines.
May 30th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
This says it much better than I did:
“Although every human being (of whatever ethnicity) experiences the natural visual illusion of parallel edges—like roadsides or railroad tracks—appearing to converge toward a point as they approach the horizon, it is not natural to reproduce this illusion in pictures. In other words, while everybody sees the same phenomenon in reality, no one, no matter how artistically talented, is innately predisposed to picture it (except, remarkably, certain autistic prodigies). Perspective is a technique that generally must be learned. Therefore there is no reason to believe that nature rather than nurture had anything to do with why artists in other ages and cultures did not pursue the “realism” preferred in the West.
Young children do instinctively make pictures from a number of viewpoints simultaneously….Until the infusion of Euclidean geometry and optics in the arts of western Europe during the early Renaissance, no artists anywhere had cultural need to have their pictures replicate the optics of single-viewpoint vision, and almost all the conventions they employed for signifying solid form and distant space—even in the most sophisticated art of the pre-Renaissance West and all other non-Western cultures—evolved from similar expressions found in the instinctive art of children.
This does not mean that non-perspectival pictures should be labeled “childlike” in the sense of being primitive (or inferior) to the Western style. Quite the contrary. Multiple viewpoints and other innate pictorial signifiers, such as placing nearby figures and objects at the bottom of the picture surface and those more distant at the top, have been refined into some of the most aesthetically beautiful and stylish painting in all art history. Manuscript illumination in medieval Persia is a fine example (Fig. 8). Interestingly, while medieval Islam possessed Greek optics, including Euclidean geometry, long before the West—with Muslim philosophers even adding their own commentary—Muslim painters never applied optics to art, and only used geometry for the creation of elaborate abstract designs in their magnificent architecture.
Artists in China and Japan, on the other hand, refined two perspective conventions that had naught to do with optical geometry. (Euclid was unknown in the Far East until the seventeenth century.) One method was a kind of axonometric projection whereby rectilinear objects were drawn as if their perpendicular sides were set at an angle, just as in Western perspective, but with their parallel edges remaining parallel and never converging (Fig. 9). The other convention, called aerial or atmospheric perspective, provided an effective illusion of distant landscape simply through the tonality of color. Far-off mountains, for instance, were painted in hazy gray or blue in contrast to the brighter colors of nearer foreground objects, thus creating an ideal complement to the Chinese predilection for philosophic contemplation. During the Renaissance, atmospheric perspective was also explored by Western artists, notably Leonardo da Vinci.”
And on and on and on. No idea about the source, but it’s a good summary.
http://science.jrank.org/pages.....tives.html
May 30th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
this looks like a good bibliography, too:
Damisch, Hubert. The Origin of Perspective. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.
Edgerton, Samuel Y. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York: BasicBooks, 1975.
Kemp, Martin. The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
Summers, David. Real Spaces. New York, Phaidon, 2003.
White, John. The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1987.
May 30th, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Sure, and I totally agree with all that, I was just nitpicking about the (maybe implied?) notion that 1-point perspective was somehow an artifact of optical recording devices and that 2-point perspective was because you have two eyes.
I was going to have a little ramble about cubism where I was going to say something like, “Cubism at its core is about escaping from a specific concrete representation of perspective and using space to represent a changing vantage point, be it looking at an object from multiple angles or showing the progress of time. I totally dig cubism,” but I didn’t want to get bogged down on referring to a single alternative to fixed perspective and so on.
I should have been more clear and saved you a lot of work in finding stuff to quote and so on; I was really just responding to the notion that 1-point perspective was a way of trying to emulate binocular vision, as if binocular vision had anything to do with perspective.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
no big deal! i see exactly what you were saying. i’m glad you brought it up, because afterwards I found that good stuff that further clarified what i was trying to say…i think the real issue i’m interested in here is east vs. west when it comes to perspective–something i know nothing about, but am looking into!
May 30th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
also: excellent point about cubism!
June 5th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
lens drawings need a bit of help…
conceptually gorgeous nonetheless
June 6th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Just to clarify Fluffy’s point, I think the term you meant to use was “linear perspective.” One-point perspective is a type of linear perspective. It’s used when there is only one vanishing point needed to construct an object or a space in a picture.
Obviously when you say “death to one point perspective” it’s just fun hyperbole, but I think in rejecting linear perspective, you’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It’s an extremely useful system for describing basic physical facts in a picture, like the distance between objects or their relative size. And offering readers the illusion of varying degrees of depth in the panels of a comic does a lot to keep their eye interested.
June 7th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Steve,
You’re right about both things: that I should’ve said “linear perspective,” and that the last statement was just fun hyperbole.
July 26th, 2007 at 5:56 am
ihave mach wont the linear perspective
April 23rd, 2008 at 3:15 pm
More research, this time on the Egyptians:
What is ancient Egyptian art?
May 30th, 2008 at 7:41 am
this is only a little bit weird the pictures are very disturbing