There is an oft spoken phrase regarding the act of looking at an image.  The viewer may choose to see the image in the minds eye or in the eyes mind. Huh?

What does that mean? Sometimes just repeating the phrase is confusing. Consider a still life. A vase of fresh flowers backlit from sunlight sits on the window sill. Viewed from the minds eye, we know we are looking at flowers, so we can just draw a flower, petals, stem, vase with some bright colored water, some yellow sunlight in the background because that is what it is.

But what if you had no idea of what a flower or a vase was? Window sill, what's that? Can you imagine? Maybe you have looked at an abstract painting once at a museum and felt that it made no sense to you, it was merely made up of some pattern of colored forms. If you were asked to duplicate the abstract painting you would probably pay close attention to the forms and their relationship, their values and colors as you recreated the picture.

It probably wouldn't matter if the painting was flipped upside down or sideways. This is because you are seeing with the eyes mind. Forms, not objects. Seeing the flowers and the vase with the eyes mind is to see it without a preconceived idea of what it is. Seeing the forms and their relationship to each other. It is not an easy task to see with the eyes mind. Our expectations influence our perceptions. Are you looking or are you actually seeing? Are you hearing or are you truly listening? Can we pause long enough to slow down and turn off our history for a moment… to dissolve all our prejudices before opening our eyes.

Enter a scene as a new world. Try squinting and imagine that everything you are looking at has no meaning…it is simply forms and shapes of light and dark and bursts of color and geometric patterns. Maybe it is a feeling, a warmth, a melancholy, a measure of time, time moving fast, time suspended, time dancing all at once. Is there movement. Maybe the patterns are organic, maybe structural. Is there balance, or asymmetry? In the book Art and Illusion by E. H. Gombrich, the author considers that the interpretation of art becomes as much the responsibility of the spectator as that of the artist.

It is the viewers call, it is their subjective observation and prejudices that render a particular truth, recognition or emotional response to what they see before them. So many viewers, so many opinions. A flower in a vase, or the fleeting last light from a warm afternoon, or a shower of light, or remembrance of a lost love. The viewer shares the responsibility of seeing in, of accepting or rejecting, or rearranging the illusion before them, attaching their own truths and ideologies. Between the artist and the spectator lies a panoply of viewpoints and a twilight of truths.

The term starving artist is really beginning to it home. As more and more people are tightening their wallets, more and more artists are leaving the art world or worse yet, reducing their prices. Lower prices and cheaper art will not save the art community.

An Artist Lesson: Understanding Value.

When artists talk about the value in a painting they may not be talking about price. It's just as possible they're talking about the overall use of dark and light tones on the canvas. The value of any color is a relative assessment of how light or dark it is. A color with a low value will be very dark, and one with a high value will be light. Putting a very dark color next to a very light color creates high contrast, and putting two colors next to each other with similar values creates low contrast. An extreme example of low contrast would be to paint an entire canvas in one value even if it is painted in many colors.

Perhaps we are viewing a scene of San Francsico and it's a very foggy day. One of the ways an artist is going to convey that grey city landscape is to develop a composition in which the value of all the colors within the painting are fairly similar. In this painting there might be colors with distinctly differing hues, for example a medium shaded cobalt blue and a deep shaded crimson red, and yet they could have approximately the same value.

The challenge for the new student is do discern the value that different colors have. Value is important to painting because through it's variations attributes such as depth, texture, volume, distance, source of light, focus points and mood are created. So its important to become adept at knowing the values of the colors one uses.

There are several ways to develop a keener sense of value. The simplest is to squint while looking at subject, or put on a pair of sunglasses.. The more we squint, the hazier things become and the richness of all color is drained from our sight. Our view becomes more black and white and the true values, the brightness or darkness of all colors become more apparent. A blue, a dark red and a green can all have the same value.

To truly test your sense of value try this simple and insightful lesson. Take a wooden cube or any cube where all sides are the same color and place in on a piece of cardboard. Then shine a light from an angle so that the cube cast a shadow and has lit and dark faces. Paint three different studies of that cube. In each study, use different colors to paint the various cube faces as well as the shadow that is cast, yet try your best to make each color match the value of the degree of lightness or darkness of the individual sides of the cube. You now have three paintings of that cube with totally different pallet of colors, but hopefully, three paintings where the variations in value are exactly the same.

To see how well you did take each of the paintings and make a black and white copy on a Xerox By producing a black and white copy you reduce all colors to there true values. The three copies should look exactly the same but don't be disappointed if they don't! Practice will get you closer.