Notebook

Notebook, 1993-

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Gradients
"We must digress again to consider psychological qualities ordinarily taken for granted, even by artists. European art from the later years of the Middle Ages to well into the last century depended greatly on the artist's ability to achieve depth by various orderings of line, shape, value, color, and texture on a flat surface, wall, board or canvas. No wonder the elaborate picture frame became so important in time: it served to isolate the painting and establish it as a kind of window upon ever-deepening landscape space. But there is nothing in any of these elements to suggest that either deep or shallow space will be the result of their use. However, the moment they are put down with great skill and knowledge of optics, or even thrown down--two or three lines or shapes, two or more colors or values (strong and weak, warm and cool, dark and light), rough and smooth textures--the viewer will have some undeniable experience of advancing and receding parts.

Arnheim, accepting a suggestion made by James J. Gibson in his book The Perception of the Visual World (1950), says that "three-dimensional space is created by perceptual gradients." He describes these as the "gradual increase or decrease of some perceptual quality in space or time. For example, oblique parallelograms contain a gradient of location, in that the slanted figure lies at an evenly changing distance from the normal axes of the horizontal and vertical." Even a single oblique line contains a gradient of location or distance in relation to the implied horizontal and vertical axes (repeated in the sides and top and bottom of a square or rectangular format). A series of lines or shapes, wherein the elements diminish in height or width, contains a gradient of size. If the intervals of space between these elements grow narrower or wider, they too contain a gradient of size. The other gradients are those of value (light-dark gradient) and texture (smooth-rough gradient); still another pertains to sharpness/dullness or firm/fuzzy qualities.

Gradients . . . . are not dependent on anything seen in nature or the world; they pertain entirely to illusionary space, whether used to depict anything or not. The flat surface is forced to yield so that the eye may achieve order in dept . . . . "

[Harlan, Calvin. Vision & Invention, An Introduction to Art Fundamentals. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986.]




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