Seeing Things

Painting by Sally West

Sally West

Love things like this that allow you to see clearly your store of images of people, some of the ones you "see" when reading only here in broad daylight.

There is next to nothing there. Billboards were good for that too. A variation on Terrance McKenna's "half the time when you think you are thinking, you are listening.” That might translate to “Half the time when you think you’re looking, you’re remembering.”

Got to live my dream one summer, painting billboards for the Catskill Game Farm: 24 foot giraffes, African Landscape, charging rhinos oh my. It was a summer job mostly but we kept at it part time into the Fall.

The best thing about them was getting to paint the African landscape and the clouds in the sky. I worked with my friend Peter Hammer who was ten year older than me and the only other student at Bard to have a child. He was a big help because I was very green and had no idea what went on in the work world. I learned at least as much painting those boards as I did in art school mostly about simplifying and exaggerating and letting the viewer finish the painting.

For instance from the road, the giraffes which I thought were thoroughly shaded turned out to have only one blend down the neck, the rest was all hard edge. Then there was the 6 ft. shrimp which I 'corrected' the color of from bright white with bright red raked through it to a natural coral pink. From the road this made it look like a nylon stocking draped on the lip of a laundry hamper. Back to raking red through white. Those were scary boards, fifty feet high because the New York State Thruway authority made them stay back six hundred feet from the road.

The only ones scarier were the ones up on 40' telephone poles. When we painted them out we didn't rig a scaffold, the work was done on a 60' wooden ladder that would slide down the board when the wind blew and then ease back up when it shifted, sending the ladder to the side and requiring you jerk it back like making a bike do a wheelie to get it straight again. The rest of the time I wasn't scared too much but I did wonder why the guard rail on the scaffold was only knee high.

NOTHING IS KNOWN, EVERYTHING IS IMAGINED - Federico Fellini

Once when I was coming down, having been awake for forty eight hours, on the beach at Coney Island and perhaps not accustomed to seeing people at a distance so clearly and isolated, I saw someone I knew far away. Someone I hadn’t seen in years. Excited I couldn’t wait for the reunion. Then as they got nearer, bit by bit it was revealed that it was just someone who looked a lot like them.

A few short minutes passed and there was another! What's happening. My lucky day. I could use an old friend. This went on for the rest of the afternoon, a parade of significant others, crushes, acquaintance, people I barely knew but was happy to see given the serendipity in the air....this kept happening after I was on to it, just as convincing but a little less surprised when it was another false positive.

"Capgras syndrome is a delusional misidentification disorder where a person believes that a familiar person, object, or animal has been replaced by an identical duplicate. It's also known as the "delusion of doubles". The most common symptom is the belief that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter, despite the person looking exactly the same".

This was a reversed version in which a perfect stranger looks like dear old friend. William Burroughs talks about coming down from speed and getting all sentimental about someone from long ago who you really didn't get along with at the time, but now there's this buzz...and you have to call them on the phone. I did have Capgras syndrome one weekend.

My girlfriend couldn't deal and put me in the care of friends. I was convinced that my friends had either been replaced by people who looked exactly like them but were psychiatric nurses aides sent to monitor me. There was a slightly less crazy version in which my friends were blowing there cover of being psychiatric nurses aides all along, who were sent to look after me. There was about ten percent of my mind left that knew the whole thing was daft but had no idea how to make it resolve, how to make it stop.

This was made less insane than it sounds by the fact that that had happened to me. I had managed to get kicked out of Payne Whitney Clinic and got a job doing the 1970 Census. During the training I looked over and sitting beside me slouched down in his chair with his cap pulled down, was one of the aides from the hospital. How had they found me? Thought it better not to ask or cause any friction.

"Yeah, I hated that place" says Michael. There was a pause as two bad actors prepared for a little theater improv out in public. What do you know he was my work partner., which meant that the people running the training were in on it. Great. Bear in mind in those days ir was remarkably easy to get 51-50’d. Someone could just make a call and poof, don’t ask to ‘make a phone call’ this is not that game; your rights have flown.

He was a nice guy and required to play the role of ex psychiatric nurses aide, so that helped. We went around to single occupancy hotels with mostly old people just barely hanging on. I only remember two ancient sisters who were substitute teachers in schools in Montgomery County. I don’t think I said anything about what a long commute it was from Midtown to suburban Maryland. The only other one I remember was an old guy recently out of prison who was cooking whole green beans in a shallow skillet on a hot plate. He was very gentle and cordial. I was a very green, sheltered twenty three year old I had to suppress my dread of ending up like this. It didn’t seem all that unlikely.

_*_

Painting billboards. Summer job 1967

Most of the signs were around Kingston New York. Occasionally you would look over your shoulder and see a little Polish guy way back at the road with enormous binoculars spying on us. That would be Mr. Modjeska who started the company in 1929 and wasn’t supposed to work anymore; doctor’s orders because he had a heart attack and I suspect because he was a tiny tornado of nervous energy and drove everybody crazy at the shop. Naturally he had to be there the day we let the scaffold down what we thought was all the way but the second we let go of the ropes it flipped over spilling us and all the paint. We cracked up at this clown act version of our worst fear. Mr. Modjeska was still upset when we got back to the shop.

Once when we were sufficiently far enough away from Kingston to risk getting a six pack to go with lunch, the elephant that was sticking its toe in the water of a pond was now rendered parting the water like the red sea. Our worst fear nearly came true one day on a sign with sheet metal facing which hid the fact that ants had eaten away the wood underneath. Once we had the scaffold rigged and climbed over the top from the back to get on it, the entire works began to tear off, ants pouring out everywhere. We made it back over the top and were able to gingerly lower the scaffold and retreat.

The train up was repainting twenty-nine Catskill Game Farm boards. Nothing got the message, let the viewer's eye finish the picture, across better. A giraffe that looked fully rendered and shaded from the road, upon inspection up close, revealed that it had one blended area down the middle of the neck and the rest was hard edge with a hard edge border around the whole.

A six foot shrimp draped over the edge of a cocktail glass looked like a discarded nylon stocking after I applied my 'accurate, I know better’ color. After several tries to make that work I conceded that the guy who had rendered it in bright pure white and the taken the gnarliest brush splayed apart in spiky fingers and raked pure red through the white, that guy knew what he was doing.

There were two boards that scared me. Number one because I was by myself and number two, they were both oddities. “There is some slate on the bank you can use to level the ladder” said Carl, the very non-identical twin who ran the shop. His brother was round and soft and did the books and the office work. There was slate alright but it wasn’t confidence building that it took six or seven pieces to level the ladder and then a few more when the ladder was reset. The work was fast. A piss coat. Carl loved that term, could not say piss coat often enough.

The other one that scared me was an oddity next to a ramp that fed a road onto the highway. The board was up on forty foot telephone poles and to get up there you needed a sixty foot wooden ladder. So far so good. It was windy and previous years of windy conditions had rocked the board back and forth and given it a little play, stretching the cables that held it in check. I be painting away as fast as I could and then a breeze would tip the board back and down the ladder would go in the slippery white paint. Then the wind would blow the other way and the ladder would make its way back up but now veering to the side. Nice that I can paint over two feet more but this can’t go on so when again the breeze starts the ladder down again the only thing to do is to perform a ladder-wheelie and jerk it back to vertical. The hot Sun, the slippery oil paint and the fact that my license had expired added a few more layers of nerves.

The reason for the schematic versions was that they were easy to repaint stuck on a scaffold, arms length away; the ones done in the shop where you could get back from them were a miasma of tones with no hard edges easy to get lost in. With practice and trial and error you could get better I suppose but we only encountered one, a rhinoceros, grey of course and in steep foreshortening to boot. We had to resort to Peter getting far back by the road, calling out prompts with limited success. Poor Rhino looked worse for wear by the time we were through with him. My hat’s off to the guys who do the political portraits. Those are all photos now, but when I first came here in 1978 there was still a city ordinance that all the big boards beside the raised highway through town, had to be painted by hand.

Spinning Playhouse. My greatest invention.

I made a large one for open studio, but not one person was willing to get inside. The kid size one was made from four yards of material hung from a hoop and painted with a landscape in the style of Japanese screens, lots of 'voids'. This was important because if I connected everything up, that was fine but now you were no longer in the scene but rather looking at the scene. I thought the voids in Japanese screen painting were imparting philosophy not making the picture work. For reasons that are not clear, the screens are often displayed flat in Museums. There is one in the Asian Museum in San Francisco of two cranes flying past each other. I bought a postcard of it and folded in on the divisions. Now the cranes were circling one another.

The initial idea was to make a substitution for the blanket and pillow fort that the kids in daycare would construct, one that allowed entry and exit all around. But when it spun it was captivating. Inside, with no other reference, it is as convincing as when the train next to yours moves forward and you feel for a moment that you are moving backwards. The first little girl I put inside got starry-eyed, and then staggered out dizzy. I was spinning it way too fast. It's actually best at very slow speeds. You can have fleeting feelings that the scenery is still and you are circling like a bird.

Rather than the painting appearing to pivot as I expected, the eye would select sets, going first to a vertical element, ignore the circular and see them going across two sets of picture planes, like the view from the windshield in a car and the side window. So if it was rotating clockwise the view out the driver's side window would be ignored, then snap into a view and appear to move across and then change again at the A pillar on the right and go beside. In other words 3D is something you do, not something that is out there and you receive. Cool, no?

I found out when I was writing by a window that looked out over Berkeley with a tall pine in the next block framing the left side of the window and then progressively stretching farther away to the bay as you looked across.

I would look up every once in a while, not to look at anything in the view in particularly, mostly just gazing and trying to think of what I was working on.

After a long time I started to notice that every time I looked up I always looked at the bottom center of the window pane. There was nothing special about it.

Then my eye went immediately to the tall pine, also not a point of interest that deserved thirty or forty repetitions, and then across and out to the bay in steps over the the bridge to San Francisco.

That was the process of establishing the horizontal and vertical essentials to assembling the 3D illusion, the same process used when looking at painting and the reason art teachers nag you to pay attention the the edges of the canvas and harp on the ‘picture plane’. I took this to mean a single monolithic plane and didn’t know there could be more within a picture with the edges being an establish guide or that as with the Japanese screen or the playhouse, not dependent on being flat. I thought I just saw in three D as an ability not as an activity. A class of activity that runs the show we call reality or the look of things anyway.

Bokeh, masses of circles of light, shows up in Maxfield Parrish's trees because he was painting over a photolithograph where the camera has this simplifying effect. I think circles and anything that looks like droplets of water have special appeal. I think a lot of appeal of shiny things come from resembling our life or death friend, water.

Here is another magical effect. The eye can tell something is off. But what.

The reflection is not a true reflection, it is the primary scene turned upside down, when in nature it would be the view at the level of the water half way between the scene and the viewer.

Even Birds Like Shiny Objects

From a note I almost threw out at the dump today.

Even Birds Like Shiny Objects notes on the charm of reflections.

First I noticed that once I got a stainless steel sink or even a white porcelain one clean and then went a little further, images would appear, reflections. Then if I went further the images would appear in color. even at the previous stage the image would draw the eye past the surface, the focus would be off the sink and on the miniaturized, contained world of the reflections.

On the one hand taking the eye away from any blemishes that remained and also affording a view of what was behind or to the side. A way to have eyes in back of your head or around corners if the surface is upright like a door jamb.

I wondered if reflections association with water was another support for making them appear; the search for water, signs of water. Shiny leaves all around when it has rained.

The effect like the lines on a television screen or the warp and woof of a tapestry as your face appears in the grain of a polished wood table again drawing you past the surface inviting you to scry as in a black mirror.

For the suspicious, a way to see if fingerprints reveal that the perfect mirror surface has been touched and by whom especially if small children are around.

Short cuts are taken only small patches at a time are accurate. What keeps “pretty celebrities’ from turning ugly is that our eyes scan rapidly over a scene and retain the infocus bits even if we start to stare.

When you see scans that track the eye looking at a scene, it's a wonder that it looks smooth and cinematic. All done in some editing booth in your head at blazing speed to keep things looking "real."